A Geological Tour of Saxony, 1785
LLeske, Nathanael Gottfried (1751-1786). Reise durch Sachsen in rüksicht der naturgeschichte und ökonomie unternommen und beschrieben. Leipzig: in der J.G. Müllerschen Buchhandlung, 1785.
Nathaniel Leske made a tour of Saxony in 1782 and visited many of the basalt locations that are marked on Charpentier’s map (see exhibit item 33). One of those was a site at Lauterbach, which is near Görlitz, in eastern Saxony, where basalt columns are much in evidence. The location of Görlitz is marked near the right border of the Charpentier map. Leske’s account has a half-dozen plates of columnar basalt formations at various places in Saxony.
In our copy of Leske’s Travels, fifteen of the forty engraved plates are hand-colored. The colored plates, however, show landscapes, local costumes, and animal collections; the geological plates are left in their natural black and white state.