By Andrew G. Tindle and Peter N. Sleep
Philip Rashleigh was born in 1729, the eldest son of Cornish landowner and Member of Parliament, Jonathan Rashleigh. Although born in London and educated at Oxford, his family home was Menabilly, near Fowey in Cornwall where he spent most of his time. Philip himself served continuously as MP for Fowey between 1765 -1802.
Rashleigh began collecting minerals around 1765 and continued until his death in 1811. He developed an unparalleled collection – very rich in Cornish material but liberally laced with choice specimens from Europe and Russia, acquired from his overseas contacts. In recognition of his knowledge of Cornish mineralogy and of the quality of the collection he amassed, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
Philip’s passion for minerals led him to write two magnificent books (Specimens of British Minerals Vol. 1 & 2) on his collection, both remarkable for the time (1797 and 1802), not least because they are profusely illustrated in colour. Copies are now highly sought after in the antiquarian book market.
After Philip’s death, his collection of over 4000 specimens was divided up and the major parts now reside in Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro (recently renamed the Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery) and in the Natural History Museum in London.
With the help and support of the Royal Institution of Cornwall a number of Rashleigh-related projects have been made possible.
Three of these have reached completion and the documents are available for download on this page.
Other Rashleigh projects are in the pipeline and it is hoped to bring some of them to the Russell Society website in due course.
Rashleigh’s Minerals
Andrew G. Tindle 2025
Chapter 1 is an introduction to Philip Rashleigh and his minerals.
Chapters 2 and 3 presents all the text and all the illustrations from Philip Rashleigh’s two volumes “Specimens of British Minerals”. Although not facsimiles, everything is included.
Chapters 4 and 5 take each specimen in turn and presents transcripts and photographs of those in the Royal Institution of Cornwall’s collection in Truro
Chapter 6 is where supplementary information is to be found – specimen details including museum catalogue numbers, and for the Cornish specimens a map of their distribution.
Two versions of this book are provided – for Mac (and iPad) users there is an interactive version (file extension .iBook) and for other users there is a pdf version. The main difference between the two versions is the lack of interactivity in the pdf (with mineral galleries being replaced with single images of specimens).
Note: Both files are very large and will take sometime to load and open.
Rashleigh’s 1765-1780 Mineral Catalogue
Andrew G. Tindle and Peter N. Sleep 2025
When Philip began collecting minerals he recorded specimens in a small leather-bound notebook. It makes for an interesting and challenging read because at the time many, if not most, minerals did not have formal names. Philip’s 18th century prose was used instead. The book was in a terrible state of preservation until 2017 when it was sent to PZ Conservation in Penzance http://www.pzconservation.org.uk/2018/01/a-behind-scenes-glimpse-filming.html . AGT was invited to photograph the book at this time. This pdf contribution consists of photographs of all the pages, transcripts and list of all the localities mentioned by Rashleigh.
The Arthur Aikin Catalogue of Philip Rashleigh’s Minerals
Peter N. Sleep and Andrew G. Tindle 2025
When Philip Rashleigh died in 1811 his extensive mineral collection, very rich in contemporary specimens from Cornwall, passed to his nephew William Rashleigh. The collection was housed in a room at Menabilly, the ancestral home of the Rashleigh family which is located on the outskirts of Fowey, Cornwall. The room was devoted to the display of minerals with thirty feet of wall cases with drawers underneath, containing several thousand carefully labelled specimens.
In the summer of 1814 William Rashleigh engaged Arthur Aikin (not Aiken as the cover and title page show) to re-arrange a selection of minerals containing Copper (485 entries), Silver (116 entries), and Tin (366 entries) from the collection, and to prepare a catalogue of these specimens. Aikin was a prominent chemist and mineralogist at the time, publishing his Manual of Mineralogy in 1815, based on material from lectures delivered to the Geological Society in the winter of 1814. The re-arranged material was housed in four cubic cabinets in the centre of the mineral room at Menabilly.
Philip Rashleigh had prepared a manuscript catalogue of a part of his mineral collection in a large green leather bound folio volume of 265 pages, containing numbered descriptions of about 3,900 specimens, often with localities, entered as the specimens were received into the collection.
Aikin has added a second number beneath his own catalogue number for many of the specimens; these purport to refer to the catalogue number of the same specimen in Rashleigh’s green catalogue. Unfortunately many of these numbers do not correlate with the corresponding descriptions in the Rashleigh catalogue. Research into the many discrepancies is ongoing.
Arthur Russell, writing in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall in 1952, describes Aikin’s efforts of re-arrangement as “a misfortune, for he seems to have lost or misplaced a good many of the original numbers and labels, and further to have re-labelled certain specimens with wrong localities.” It is certainly the case that Aikin’s work with Rashleigh’s collection has added a layer of complexity and confusion to the documentation of the specimens. This transcription of Aikin’s catalogue and its wider availability to interested researchers is intended to provide a step towards clarification.
