George Poulett Scrope (1797–1876) was a British geologist who studied at Cambridge, where his teachers included Adam Sedgwick, and who became a close colleague of Charles Lyell. As an undergraduate he developed a lifelong fascination with volcanos, inspired by visits to Vesuvius and Etna. After graduating in 1821 he spent six months exploring extinct volcanos of the Massif Central in France, and he returned to Naples to witness the 1822 eruption of Vesuvius. In 1825 he published Considerations on Volcanos (also reissued in this series), and in 1826 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His pioneering work on France was originally published in 1827 as Memoir on the Geology of Central France and later revised for the 1858 edition reissued here. It contains detailed descriptions and illustrations of volcanos, and argues that the concept of geological time is important for the understanding of mineralogy and volcanism.