THE DEVELOPMENT OF MINERALS. 399 



passage from the stone to the animal ; and, although I am not in ab- 

 solute accord with him in all his conclusions, we agree in the most 

 essential points. 



These studies are not of yesterday, and, as is the case with many 

 other branches of knowledge, it is hard to go back to the first person 

 who entered upon them. No branch of science is born in a day ; but 

 they all come to their growth in the minds of men and of masses of 

 men by a kind of infiltration, or slow and often unconscious accretion. 

 In 1867 M. Bombicci, Professor of Mineralogy in the University 

 of Bologna, became especially interested in phenomena relating to 

 minerals. Some of his experiments in crystallography were of par- 

 ticular interest, and were marked with the stamp of a rare originality 

 of conception. But he treated the problems they suggested with great 

 boldness, and carried his speculations upon them, perhaps, beyond the 

 limits of rigorous science. It fell to M. Pilo's lot not to institute 

 new experiments, but to collect those of M. Bombicci, his master and 

 friend, correct and edit them, prune them of what about them was too 

 technical, and, checking them with new facts duly substantiated, to pre- 

 sent them in a more modest aspect, better deserving to attract atten- 

 tion. M. Pilo has given, in a kind of list, the analogies between the 

 organic and inorganic kingdoms, and has concluded from them that 

 there exists a kind of mineral biology. His memoir, aside from its 

 philosophical parts, is a comparative chart of organic biology and 

 mineral biology, and shows that all the branches of studies relating to 

 organic beings can also be applied to minerals. 



He begins by defining life as the state of integration of matter 

 when it, departing from the simply molecular condition, arrives at the 

 state of forming complex groups of determined chemical and physical 

 structure, and becomes capable of reacting upon the ambient medium 

 in such a way as to assimilate to itself the elements peculiarly suitable 

 to it. The individual being a determinate chemical compound under 

 a determinate form, the elementary crystal presents all the charac- 

 istics of individuality, comprising of them, under the name of crystal, 

 all that has been called, with certain differences of significance, the in- 

 tegrant molecule by Hatiy, the physical molecule by Delafosse, or the 

 elementary crystalline stitch of the crystalline network by Bravais. I 

 do not think that, even admitting this definition, we have any right to 

 deny individuality to bodies that are called amorphous. It is not 

 becoming to adopt the exclusiveness of the old mineralogy, which 

 assumed to occupy itself only with the minerals existing in the bosom 

 of the earth, and regarded as of its domain salt when it was found in 

 mines, but refused to study the chloride of sodium which was pro- 

 duced in a laboratory. Amorphousness is still only a condition of 

 form, and it would be absurd to give individuality to a gramme of 

 crystallized sulphur, and refuse it when the same gramme of sulphur, 

 having been fused, has been cooled in a vessel of water. The word 



