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“Both literature and science devoted serious attention to rugged, mountainous landscapes for the first time in the later eighteenth century, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. By locating the common origins of geology and Romantic nature poetry in a matrix of cultural practices surrounding landscape aesthetics—including tourism, amateur naturalizing, and landscape design, as well as the consumption of fashionable travel narratives and works of aesthetic theory— … these two, now separate, disciplines diverged in response to a single set of historical conditions. Rocks and mountains marked a frontier that Enlightenment science and neoclassical aesthetics had not crossed. With the new demand for mineral resources, the earth’s material presented itself as a foreign substance, provoking both sublime wonder and scientific curiosity. Writers of the period addressed social as well as philosophical dimensions of this newly resonant materiality, making it impossible for us either to discount the exploding demand for fossil fuels and metals or to reduce a complex cultural pattern to this one cause.”

From Noah Heringman (2004) Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, Cornell University Press,