On Columbite and other North American Minerals. 89 



An Account of the Columbite of Haddam, ( Connecticut,) with 

 Notices of several other North American Minerals. By 

 John Torrey, M. D. Read March 1, 1824. 



The history of Columbium is recorded in almost every 

 work on Chemistry and Mineralogy, and is familiar to all who 

 have made these sciences their study. Though it is now twen- 

 ty years since Mr. Hatchett made his interesting discovery, 

 the only North American specimen of Columbite known until 

 lately, was the original one in the British Museum, and even 

 the precise locality of that is not known. It is said to have 

 been sent many years since by the late Governor Winthrop, of 

 Connecticut, to Sir Hans Sloane, then President of the Royal 

 Society ; after whose death it was deposited in the Museum 

 where it still remains. According to a notice in the 8th vo- 

 lume of the New- York Medical Repository, the locality is said 

 to be near a spring not far from the house of Gov. Winthrop, 

 near New-London. It has, however, been many years sought 

 for without success ; and some mineralogists have doubted 

 whether the specimen in the British Museum was found in 

 Connecticut, or in any part of this country ; but that it was a 

 Swedish specimen of Tantalite, which had by mistake been la- 

 belled as North American. 



In a collection of minerals which I sent many years since 

 to Count Trolle Wachtmeister, this distinguished savant in- 

 formed me, that in one of the specimens from Haddam, 

 containing cymophane, beryl, &c. Professor Berzelius had 

 detected the Tantalite, and that it exactly resembled that of 

 Finbo in Sweden. A notice of this discovery I published 

 in the 4th volume of Silliman's Journal, but it has been over- 

 looked by Cleaveland in the second edition of his excellent 

 work, and also by Phillips in the last edition of his Mineralo- 

 gy. As soon as I received this interesting information, I care- 

 fully examined the one or two specimens of the Haddam rock 



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