552 



DOMAIN VI. CARBONACEOUS. 



MODE II. ANTHRACITE. 



Character!. Texture, schistose and incoherent. 



Hardness, cretic. Fracture, slaty. Frag- 

 ments, amorphous, rather sharp. 



"Weight, carbonose. 



Lustre, sometimes dull, but generally glisten- 

 ing and even metallic. Opake. 



The colour is often a dark black, but some- 

 times has a metallic reflection, which is particu- 

 larly conspicuous in that elegant kind called 

 Kilkenny coal ^ and which might with much 

 Kirwanite. propriety be called Kirwanite, in honour of the 

 great Irish mineralogist, who first introduced it 

 to scientific attention. The French continue, 

 most unaccountably, to confound it with canel 

 coal, which is quite a different substance*. 



Anthracite seems to have been first observed 

 by Dolomieu; but Born, in his elegant cata- 

 logue of Miss Raab's collection of minerals, has 

 classed it under graphite, which he calls plom- 

 lagine, or carburet of iron, in the following 



* In order to obviate this error, the author, among many other 

 British substances, placed specimens of Kilkenny coal in the 

 museum of the Jardin des Plantes, and another great collection at 

 Paris. 



