Description

While a student, George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876) visited Vesuvius and Etna and developed a passionate enthusiasm for volcanos. He did pioneering fieldwork in France in 1821, witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius in 1822, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1826. Scrope became increasingly involved in economics and politics, but later in his career published revised versions of two pioneering books on volcanism he had originally published in the 1820s. Volcanos (1862), reissued here, was based on his Considerations on Volcanos (1825, also reissued in this series) and dedicated to his life-long friend and colleague Charles Lyell. This influential work on volcanic phenomena includes a substantial catalogue of 'all known volcanos and volcanic formations' as well as a dramatic illustration of Vesuvius. It was translated into French and German, went into a second English edition in 1872, and was one of the foundational texts of volcanology.