The fourth volume of the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall (RGSC), published in 1832, included a handsome pull-out map as its frontispiece. The map showed, in full colour, the underlying geology of Cornwall (see Figure 3.1). It had been produced by Dr Henry S. Boase to illustrate his 308-page paper in the same volume, entitled ‘Contributions Towards a Knowledge of the Geology of Cornwall’. In printing this map the Society had achieved one of its foundational aims of facilitating the production of a scientific map of the entire county of Cornwall. The sense of a territory having been overcome and claimed by science was well-conveyed in the same volume's opening paper, written by John Hawkins FRS, then Vice-President of the RGSC:

At the twentieth anniversary meeting of the Society, held the following year, the Chair of the meeting, Davies Gilbert (who had been President of the Royal Society of London from 1827 to 1830), complimented Boase on his work on the geology of Cornwall, noting that it had attracted ‘considerable attention’ at the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge and would ‘take precedence of every other subject in the Geological Section’ at the Association's next meeting in Edinburgh.