Giovanni Arduino

Who was Giovanni Arduino?

Giovanni Arduino was an Italian geologist who is known as the "Father of Italian Geology".

Arduino was born at Caprino Veronese, Veneto. He was a mining specialist who developed possibly the first classification of geological time, based on study of the geology of northern Italy. He divided the history of the Earth into four periods: Primitive, Secondary, Tertiary and Volcanic, or Quaternary.

The scheme proposed by Arduino in 1759, which was based on much study of rocks of the southern Alps, grouped the rocks into four series. These were as follows: the Primary series, which consisted of schists from the core of the mountains; the Secondary, which consisted of the hard sedimentary rocks on the mountain flanks; and the Tertiary, which consisted of the less hardened sedimentary rocks of the foothills. Because this arrangement did not always hold true for mountain ranges other than the Alps, the Primary and the Secondary were dropped in the general case. However the term 'Tertiary' has persisted in geological literature until its recent replacement by the Palaeogene and Neogene periods.