[5] The work describes the Carboniferous strata in the north-east in their vertical sequence as discovered during mining operations and discusses their lateral variations.
[6] The much-expanded second edition of 1821 cemented Forster's reputation and was subscribed to by a number of eminent scientists (including Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society) and many orefield mine agents.
Turner (1793)[7] reported on a visit to Allenheads where the Westgarth Forsters, father and son, showed him "various plans and sections illustrative of the position and quality of the strata, the course of the veins, and the various mining operations."
He wrote of Westgarth Forster junior as follows, "I cannot help here congratulating the Society upon the expectation they may reasonably form of much information and entertainment from the communications of this ingenious young man, for whose nomination as an honorary member, we are much obliged to the gentleman who proposed him."
Turner (1793) saw the draft form of Forster's "nearly finished" section "of the strata which comprises the mining country to the depth of 500 fathoms."
Though the book was written when the science of geology was in its initial stage; when even people of education recognised no distinction between one kind of rock and another; when such terms as stratified and unstratified, aqueous and igneous, seldom appeared in print, and were scarcely ever heard; when the great works of Buckland, De la Beche, Phillips, Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, and other geologists had not yet appeared, the classification of the strata which it contains, is the one still in use.