388 MEMOIR OF HAUY. 



the qualities to which Werner attached himself by preference, are in 

 reality hut consequences of the form of the molecules, and of their 

 arrangement; and the happy use which" this great mineralogist made 

 of them, to recognize and determine so many species of minerals, may 

 enable us to judge with what success he might have resorted to the 

 source, when its simple derivatives were made by him so fertilizing. 

 But of that source we are indebted to Hatiy, not only for the knowl- 

 edge, but for the measure, also, of its force and its abundance. Hence 

 it was practicable for him alone to carry or to reduce to their just value 

 many results which had remained, in a manner, but half truths in the 

 hands of Werner. 



There is, at this day, scarcely a known crystallizable mineral whose 

 nucleus and molecules, with the measure of their angles and the pro- 

 portion of their sides, have not been determined by Hatiy, and of which 

 he has not referred to those first elements, all the secondary forms, by 

 discriminating for each the different decrements which produce it, and 

 ascertaining by calculation their angles and faces. In this way he has 

 at length made of mineralogy a science as precise and methodical as 

 astronomy itself. 



We may say, then, in a word, that Hatiy is to Werner and Home 

 Delisle what Newton was to Kepler and Copernicus. 



But what is more peculiarly his own, is, that Hatiy 's work is not 

 less remarkable in point of composition and method, than for the orig- 

 inal ideas on which it is founded. The purity of the style, the ele- 

 gance of the demonstrations, the care with which all the facts are 

 collected and discussed, would have made a classic of the most ordinary 

 system of mineralogy. The trace of his earlier studies reappears in the 

 skillful writer and sound geometrician ; and even that of his first scien- 

 tific recreations may be distinguished in the readiness with which the 

 physicist always comes to the support of the crystallographer, supply- 

 ing him with ingenious processes and convenient instruments, when- 

 ever it becomes necessary for him to appreciate the electricity of bodies, 

 their magnetism, and action upon light. There is a rank in science 

 which must be accorded as soon as challenged, and to that rank did 

 Haiiy ascend from the clay his work was given to the world. 



Nevertheless, on the death of Daubenton, it was Doloniieu, and not 

 Haiiy, on whom the professorship of mineralogy in the Museum of 

 Natural History was conferred. But, at that moment, arrested in 

 violation of all law, Doloniieu languished in the dungeons of Sicily. 

 The only token that he yet lived, consisted in a few lines, which, from 

 the midst of his chains, he had found the means of writing with a 

 splinter of wood and the smoke of his lamp, and which the ingenious 

 humanity of an Englishman, seconded by gold, had contrived to ex- 

 tract from the hands of the gaoler. These lines spoke as eloquently 

 in his behalf as his works ; and among those who solicited the most 

 warmly for him was Haiiy, the rival from whom he had most to ap- 

 prehend. 



It might be thought that such marks of consideration, rendered by 

 such men, would have softened the executioners of Doloniieu; but men 

 in authority, urged by the passions of the hour, as seldom inform 

 themselves of the sentiments of their cotemporaries as they foresee the 



