1866.] HUNT — OBJECTS OP MINERALOGY. Ill 



upon which the so-called natural systems of classification are 

 based. In order to understand clearly the question before us, 

 we must first consider what are the real objects, and what the 

 provinces, respectively, of mineralogy, and of chemistry. 



Of the three great divisions, or kingdoms of nature, the classifi- 

 cation of the vegetable gives rise to systematic botany, that of the 

 animal to zoology, and that of the mineral to mineralogy, which 

 has for its subject the natural history of all the forms of unorgan- 

 ized matter. The relations of these to gravity, cohesion, light, 

 electricity, and magnetism, belong to the domain of physics ; 

 while chemistry treats of their relations to each other, and of their 

 transformations under the influences of heat, light, and electricity. 

 Chemistry is thus to mineralogy what biology is to organography ; 

 and the abstract sciences, physics and chemistry, must precede, 

 and form the basis of the concrete science, mineralogy. Many 

 species are chiefly distinguished by their chemical activities, and 

 hence chemical characters must be greatly depended upon in 

 mineralogical classification. 



Chemical change implies disorganization, and all so-called 

 chemical species are inorganic, that is to say unorganized, and 

 hence really belong to the mineral kingdom. In this extended 

 sense, mineralogy takes in not only the few metals, oxyds, sulphids, 

 silicates, and other salts, which are found in nature, but also all 

 those which are the products of the chemist's skill. It embraces 

 not only the few native resins and hydrocarbons, but all the bodies 

 of the carbon series made known by the researches of modern 

 chemistry. 



The primary object of a natural classification, it must be 

 remembered, is not like that of an artificial system, to serve the 

 purpose of determining species, or the convenience of the student, 

 but so to arrange bodies in orders, genera, and species as to satisfy 

 most thoroughly natural affinities. Such a classification in 

 mineralogy will be based upon a consideration of all the physical 

 and chemical relations of bodies, and will enable us to see that the 

 various properties of a species are not so many arbitrary signs, 

 but the necessary results of its constitution. It will give for the 

 mineral kingdom what the labors of great naturalists have already 

 nearly attained for the vegetable and animal kingdoms. 



Oken saw the necessity of thus enlarging the bounds of miner- 

 alogy, and in his Physiophilosophy, attempted a mineralogical 

 classification ; but it is based on fanciful and false analogies, with 



