Minerals. 347 



were made according to which the minerals were likewise allo- 

 cated to a special department ; and in August of the same year 

 Mr. M. H. N. Story-Maskelyne, Professor of Mineralogy at the 

 University of Oxford, was appointed keeper. It was impossible 

 for the Trustees to provide him at once with much assistance, 

 scientific or general. The first appointment was that of Mr. 

 T. Davies, who was made attendant in the following February ; 

 the duties corresponding to that grade are not scientific. 

 Although Mr. Davies, who was then in his twenty-first year, had 

 had few educational opportunities, and was entirely ignorant of 

 mineralogy, he had a remarkable capacity for the recognition and 

 remembrance of the minute details of specimens, and his natural 

 talents and his usefulness, especially at that stage of development 

 of the mineral collection, became so manifest that in 1862 he 

 was promoted to the scientific grade of assistant. Trained up 

 under Mr. Maskelyne, he became a valued colleague, and gave 

 important help in the qualitative section of the departmental 

 work until his death in 1892, twelve years after Mr. Maskelyne 

 had retired. 



Before 1857 little importance had been assigned to the 

 statement of localities of specimens, and there were scarcely any 

 locality-labels with the exhibited portion of the Collection ; there 

 were no labels at all with the unexhibited specimens, many 

 thousands in number. The latter were preserved in drawers in 

 the Gallery and Basement of the Museum and were entirely 

 unarranged. In the course of several years, Mr. Maskelyne, 

 aided solely by Mr. Davies, was able to furnish locality-labels 

 from the documents contained in the archives of the department ; 

 further, he examined, sorted and arranged into species all the 

 unexhibited specimens, at the same time setting aside the dupli- 

 cates for future disposal. 



The ends of many of the cabinets were altered, glazed and 

 fitted, thus making it possible to exhibit those mineral specimens 

 which are too large to be placed in the table-tops. 



During the keepership of Mr. Maskelyne, the Mineral Collec- 

 tion was completely re-arranged, the classification adopted being 

 the crystallo-chemical system published by Prof. Gustav Rose of 

 Berlin in 1852, instead of the purely chemical system as amended 

 in 1847 by Prof. J. J. Berzelius and Prof. C. F. Rammelsberg, 

 which had been on the point of being adopted by Mr. Konig in 

 1850. In addition to two large private collections, the Allan- 

 Greg and Koksharov, numerous isolated specimens were acquired 



