8vo. 38pp. Original publisher's printed powder blue wrappers. Rubbed, spotted, and dust-soiled, old central vertical fold, manuscript shelf-mark to head of upper panel.

The fourth known copy of a catalogue of the holdings of the Manchester Geological Society as of February 1875. The society was founded in 1838, predominantly under the guidance of noted geologist and philanthropist Edward William Binney (1812-1881), who paid particular interest to providing free public access to the society's museum, established in Peter Street, Manchester in 1850 in conjunction with the Manchester Society of Natural History. By the 1860s both societies encountered financial difficulties and, on the advice of the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College (now the University of Manchester) accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867. The museum in Peter Street was sold in 1875 after Owens College moved to new buildings in Oxford Street.

The, surprisingly diminutive, catalogue arranges the holdings into eleven distinct divisions (local geology, mineralogy and mining, American and Canadian geology, works in French etc.); the library being comprised primarily of prominent nineteenth-century publications, such as an early edition of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, the only notable exception a copy of the 1557 edition of Agricola's treatise on metallurgy De re metallica (1556).

OCLC records copies at three locations (British Geological Survey, Leeds, and Manchester); COPAC adds no further.