Berzelius — Analyst? of a New Mineral, 297 



The mineral seems to occur very sparingly. Professor 

 Esmarck has informed me more lately that no new quantity has 

 been obtained, as the closeness of the locality to the surface of 

 the water prevents the rock from being blasted until the water 

 be frozen. 



The mineral contains a metallic body hitherto unknown, 

 which, in its properties, belongs to the class which forms the so 

 called proper earths, and its oxide is an earth which most 

 nearly resembles zirconia, and, what is singular enough, pos- 

 sesses the greater part of the properties and characters found in 

 the earth I formerly described, under the name of Thorina. 

 This circumstance led me at first to imagine that thorina might 

 possibly not have been, as my later experiments seemed to 

 shew, simply a sub-phosphate of yttria, but a mixture of it 

 with thorina. At the beginning of this investigation, there- 

 fore, I gave the name of thorina to the new earth, — and when 

 afterwards, by a new analysis of what still remained of the 

 mineral, in which I supposed myself to have found the older 

 thorina*, 1 could not detect a single trace of the new, I 

 thought I could, with still greater propriety, retain for this last 

 the same name, both because the former description for the 

 most part agrees with it, and because the name has already 

 been once introduced into the science. The new mineral itself 

 I have consequently called thorite f . 



ANALYSIS OF THORITE. 



a. 2.005 grammes in coarse powder were put into a small 

 tube retort, connected by caoutchouc with a receiver, from 

 which the gas given off was conducted through a tube filled 

 with chloride of calcium. The loss, by heating to redness, was 

 0.1985. Of this, 0.19 was taken up by the receiver and the 

 chloride of calcium, and consisted of water which gave a minute 

 trace of fluoric acid. 0.0085 was gas given off. 



The same portion, again heated to redness in a stream of 



* It appeared to me probable, that eudialyte from Greenland might 

 contain thorina, since, at the time when Stromeyer analyzed that mineral, 

 the properties of zirconia were not so well known as now, and therefore 

 the new earth might be mistaken for zirconia ; but I found in it, as Stro- 

 meyer has stated, only zirconia. 



t Professor Esmarck calls it berzelite,— Tr. 



