VIII 



THE GROWTH OF MINERALOGY FROM 

 1818 TO 1918 



By WILLIAM E. FORD 



MINERALOGY to-day would certainly be generally 

 considered one of the minor members of the 

 group of the Geological Sciences. We commonly 

 look upon it in the light of an useful handmaiden, whose 

 chief function is to serve the other branches, and we are 

 inclined to forget that, in reality, mineralogy was the first 

 to be recognized and, with considerable truth, might be 

 claimed as the mother of all the others. Minerals, 

 because of their frequent beauty of color and form, and 

 their uses as gems and as ornamental stones, were the 

 first inorganic objects to excite wonder and comment and 

 we find many of them named and described in very early 

 writings. Theophrastus (368-284 B. C.), a famous pupil 

 of Aristotle, wrote a treatise ' ' On Stones ' ' in which he 

 collected a large amount of information about minerals 

 and fossils. The elder Pliny (23-79 A. D.), more than 

 three centuries later, in his Natural History, described 

 and named many of the commoner minerals. At this time 

 it was natural that no clear distinction should be drawn 

 between minerals and rocks, or even between minerals 

 and fossils. As long as all study of the materials of the 

 earth's crust was concerned with their superficial char- 

 acters, it was logical to include everything under the 

 single head. There were some writers in the early cen- 

 turies of the Christian era, however, who believed that 

 fossils had been derived from living animals but the 

 majority considered them to be only strange and unusual 

 forms of minerals. During many succeeding centuries 

 little was added to the general store of geological knowl- 

 edge and it was not until the beginning of the sixteenth 



