FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF MIKHAIL LOMONOSOV'S 1763 TREATISE "ON THE STRATA OF THE EARTH"

The first English translation of Mikhail Lomonosov’s 1763 treatise On the Strata of the Earth has been published as GSA Special Paper 485. Although Mikhail Vasil’evich Lomonosov (1711-1765) is not well known outside of Russia, among Russians he is highly revered as the first great, native-born Russian scholar. He was a poet, historian, artist, and scientist. Russian historians of science always identify On the Strata of the Earthas Lomonosov’s most significant geological writing, but the lack of an English translation has prevented Anglophone historians and geologists from reading it for themselves.

On the Strata of the Earth was originally published as a 100-page appendix to a book on mining and metallurgy. It predates by 25 years James Hutton’s celebrated Theory of the Earth, published in 1788. In his own unique way, Lomonosov addresses some of the same questions as Hutton and some other eighteenth-century scholars, such as the age of the Earth, the rates of geological processes, and mechanisms of mountain building.

On the Strata of the Earth is organized into five chapters: (1) Concerning the Earth’s surface, (2) Concerning the strata of the Earth that have been exposed by man, (3) Concerning the Earth’s interior and the strata exposed by Nature herself, (4) Concerning speculations about the strata and the interior of the Earth, and (5) Concerning the usefulness of speculations and research about the Earth’s strata, especially in our Fatherland.