158 Maclure’s Letiers. 
therefore perhaps as well leave it for the present, until we 
have caught nature in the act of forming similar rocks,” 
Cupidity of Mineral Dealers. 
The conduct of many European mineral merchants, is in @ 
high degree scandalous and disgraceful. Some of them falsify 
the loeality, exaggerate the scarcity, and enhance the value 
of all the minerals within their reach, and for the purpose of 
obtaining a greater price for what they have collected, actu- 
ally destroy, with the rage of avaricious cupidity, thousands 
of specimens at the locality, where they were in abundance, 
concealing, and so disguising the place from whence they 
came, as to render it difficult for those that follow to procure 
any more. Such proceedings, hostile alike to science and to 
common honesty, tend to prolong the reign of ignorance and 
misery, and to stop the progress of the civilization of mankind, 
and are ten thousand times more criminal, than the conduct 
of the Dutch spice merchants, who burned a few cargoes of 
spices to enhance the value of what remained, as they only 
pinched our artificial appetites in their indulgence in articles 
-which perhaps did us more harm than good; whereas the 
destroyer of what is absolutely necessary to the propagation of 
knowledge, becomes the active agent of brutal ignorance, the 
supporter of despotism, bigotry, cruelty, barbarity, and all the 
evils that torment mankind. For these evils originate 
from, and are sustained and propagated by, ignorance, the 
source and only root, from which spring all the miseries of 
the human species. 
trust that no American mineralogists, or even minera 
dealers, will follow such disgraceful examples, or permit the 
love of gain, or any temporary advantage, to tempt them to 
the perpetration of such crimes. 
European systems of Geology not always applicable to Amer- 
tcan Geology. 
Some foreign geological travellers in America, in endeav- 
ouring to apply their artificial systems, to our extensive, regu- 
larly natural, geological arrangement, fall into such errors, as 
must awaken our young geologists to a proper sense of their 
