#john playfair

[lesleyannemcleod]

Prof John Playfair, scientist and mathematician, from The New Monthly Museum of September 1819

[azuldemagdalia]

«La naturaleza nos ha hecho capaces de aprender, y si nos dio una razón imperfecta, nos la dio al mismo tiempo perfectible».

John Playfair

[lindahall]

John Playfair – Scientist of the Day

John Playfair, a Scottish natural philosopher, was born Mar. 10, 1748, near Dundee.

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[asfaltics]

into beds of killas or grauwaky, 1

In many of the Veins which traverse the Killas, the Stratification becomes very indistinct, and frequently bends considerably more than any of these Sketches represent. Most of the detached fragments are contorted, and appear as if they had been softened.

Plate XV, illustrating “Account of the Structure of the Table Mountain, and other parts of the Peninsula of the Cape. Drawn up by Professor Playfair, from Observations made by Captain Basil Hall.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 7 (1814) : 269-278 (here)

Basil Hall (1788-1844 *) was son of James Hall (1761-1832 *), geologist and geophysicist, and president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in which James Hutton (1726-1797 *) his Theory of the Earth was published in 1788 (here). Professor Playfair would be John Playfair (1748-1819 *).

[straymessages]

(science mysticism) had its attractions, not least in its optimism and its sense of reverence for the natural world. But it also constantly teetered on the brink of idiocy. One of its wilder proselytisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Staffers, was said to have stated that ‘the diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses’; to which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair, made the legendary reply: ‘then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad’.

From The Age of Wonder By Richard Holmes