XIX. 



ON THE OBJECTS AND METHOD OF 

 MINERALOGY. 



(1867.) 



This paper was read before the American Academy of Sciences in Boston, January 

 8, 1867, and published in the American Journal of Science in May of the same year. 



MINERALOGY, as popularly understood, holds an anomalous 

 position among the natural sciences, and is by many regarded 

 as having no claims to be considered as a distinct science, but 

 as constituting a branch of chemistry. This secondary place is 

 disputed by some mineralogists, who have endeavored to base a 

 natural-history classification upon such characters as the crys- 

 talline form, hardness, and specific gravity of minerals. In sys- 

 tems of this kind, however, like those of Mohs and his followers, 

 only such species as occur ready formed in nature are compre- 

 hended, and the great number of artificial species, often closely 

 related to native minerals, are excluded. It may moreover be 

 said in objection to these naturalists, that, in its wider sense, 

 the chemical history of bodies takes into consideration all those 

 characters upon which the so-called natural systems of classifi- 

 cation 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 chem- 

 istry. 



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

 sification 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 

 unorganized matter. The relations of these to gravity, cohe- 



