VI PREFACE. 



Arrangement, precluded at once its use among the majority 

 of those who wish to acquire some knowledge of the min- 

 eral kingdom. 



Under these circumstances, the author imagined that he 

 might perform a serviceable task for Mineralogy, by bring- 

 ing forward a Characteristic available to the student pos- 

 sessed of less mathematical knowledge than that presuppo- 

 sed by the system of MOHS ; and he would most willingly 

 have contented himself with this performance merely, and 

 have left it for those persons who might find it for their 

 convenience to employ it, to seek elsewhere the requisite 

 knowledge of Terminology, but that he was unable to point 

 them to any single work from which they might derive 

 this information. He has therefore collected and digested, 

 into a form the most perspicuous in his power, just that 

 amount of Terminology which he believed would answer 

 the end in view. This he has done in the order pursued 

 by MOHS ; though a different view altogether has been pre- 

 sented of the subject of Crystallography. The distinctions 

 with respect to individuality in the mineral kingdom what 

 is a simple and what a compound mineral the distinct con- 

 sideration of the properties of simple and compound min- 

 erals, as well as the treatment of the property of Hardness, 

 are in close imitation of Prof. MOHS ; whose words it was 

 so often found necessary to quote, from the impossibility of 

 condensing them more highly, that for the sake of con- 

 venience, acknowledgement for the liberty taken has been 

 reserved to be made in the present summary manner. 

 Scarcely less in conformity with the plan of the above 

 mentioned treatise, the author has drawn up a view of 

 the more theoretical, but no less important, departments 



