Most geologists have a favorite kind of rock.
Mine is the Granite. Other rocks may be more beautiful, but Granite has a hidden buity which can't be overseen. Romantically perhaps in seeking the derivation of the name from its roots in ancient welsh, as gwenith faen , a wheatstone for the grinding of flour a word later latinized by the Romans. More logically of course in the 18 th century when the intellectual demands of the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the search for secular explanations for natural things. An early consensus, the Wernian view that granite was a chemical precipitate from the primordial, universal ocean, was only slowly replaced by the contrary claim that it was produced by the consolidation of matter made fluid by heat.