THOMAS STERRY HUNT. 371 



agencies which, by dissociation and combination, by integration and 

 disintegration of elemental matter throughout all space, are building 

 up other worlds, as they built up ours. In his system of mineralogy 

 neither outward resemblances, nor similarity of crystalline structure, 

 nor possession of common elements, but the relation of hardness to 

 condensation, and the further relation of these qualities to chemical 

 indifference, constituted the basis for his classification of mineral 

 species. Whether amidst such a multitude of individual species he, 

 in his first arrangement, assigned to each its proper place, may well be 

 doubted, without questioning the substantial correctness of the princi- 

 ple on which his chemical and natural-historical classification rests. 

 Yet it is impossible to follow, in his " Systematic Mineralogy," the 

 beautiful progressive series of quotients deduced from the formula 

 V = p -+■ d (V being the coefficient of condensation, p the chemical 

 equivalent, and d the specific gravity), as calculated for the species 

 under each genus, without being convinced that Hunt heard and ex- 

 pressed one of those wonderful harmonies of which it is granted to but 

 few mortals to catch the theme, amid the complexity and often appar- 

 ent discord of nature's contending voices. 



The doctrine of the equivalency of volumes, as applicable to liquid 

 and solid species, as well as to the gases, on which is founded Hunt's 

 " Natural System of Mineralogy," had dawned on his mind very early 

 in his chemical studies ; but its larger significance was revealed to 

 him only toward the close of his life. To him the domain of chem- 

 istry was much wider than it had been held to be under the old con- 

 ventional theory, which drew such precise lines between chemical and 

 mechanical forces. Like most philosophical chemists of to-day, he re- 

 garded all solution as chemical union, and all chemical union as nothing 

 else than solution. In his view all precipitation and all crystallization 

 from solutions involve chemical change, and all chemical species may 

 theoretically exist in a dissolved state, from which they pass into 

 polymeric mineral species, often insoluble. Regarding the same sub- 

 stance in its different polymeric states, due to different degrees of 

 condensation, as representing so many different chemical and mineral 

 species, he, like other chemists, was driven to construct chemical for- 

 mulas much more complex than those which satisfied the requirements 

 of the Daltonian atomic theory as it had been previously understood. 



This New Basis of Chemistry was to Hunt no longer theory, but 

 fact. He had believed for many years that the solid and liquid min- 

 eral species known to us are formed by processes of intrinsic condensa- 

 tion, or so called polymerization, from simple chemical species. He 



