The historical perspective: an ever changing emphasis

Abstract

Where do we begin this story of the stony, granular rock known as granite? Romantically, perhaps, in seeking the derivation of the name in the ancient gaelic of Wales and Cornwall, as gwenith faen, a wheatstone for the grinding of flour; or in the late medieval granito of the Italian Cesalpinas. More logically, of course, in the 18th century when the intellectual demands of the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the search for secular explanations for natural things. An early consensus, the Wernerian view that granite was a chemical precipitate from a primordial, universal ocean, was only slowly replaced by the contrary claim that it was produced by the consolidation of matter made fluid by heat. Indeed, this radical new theory was at first regarded as nothing less than a blasphemy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s Minister of Mines, who had himself written a ‘Neptunian’ essay on granite in 1784 and, reacting as well a poet might, later complained in his Xeniae Tamed Scarce noble Werner turns about Poseidon’s realm falls prey to loot.