14 



and interest, and that the duty of introducing his thoughts to* 

 the chemists of France has naturally fallen to our lot." 



We have remarked on the tendency of Hunt's mind to 

 trace more than mere analogies between the processes taking r 

 place in the different great provinces of nature. He is care- 

 ful to protest against confounding biotical, chemical and 

 dynamical activities, but none the less he could see such, 

 unity of operation in diversity of modes and forms, that the 

 very phraseolog} 7 he adopted or invented implied closer resem- 

 blances than he actually wished to describe. The terms- 

 inter penetration, condensation, identification, by which lie 

 strove to explain chemical phenomena, and the creation of 

 new chemical species, were suggested, I think, rather UN- 

 physiology than, as illustrated by Spring, by dynamics. 

 While he admits that u the mode of generation which produces- 

 individuals like the parent can present no analogy to the 

 phenomena under consideration, metagenesis or alternate -jen 

 eration and metamorphosis are, however, prefigured in the 

 chemical change of bodies." It was by extending to the 

 domain of mineralogy his speculations on the relations <>4 

 hardness to condensation and to the chemical susceptibility 

 or chemical indifference of bodies that he was led ultimately 

 to formulate what he considered as a general law of the high- 

 est importance, and of universal application. As I have said 

 elsewhere : * 



" Chemistry was Hunt's first love; and he never deserted 

 her. When he studied geology, his impulse was to seek 

 below the visible results of mechanical causes for the all- 

 pervading chemical forces and agencies which, by disassocia- 

 tion and combination, by integration and disintegration of 

 elemental matter throughout all space^ are building up other 

 worlds, as they built up ours. His lithological researches 

 were made not with the microscope, but in the chemical 

 laboratory ; and in his system of mineralogy, neither outward 

 resemblances nor similarity of crystalline structure, nor pos- 



1 " Biographical Sketch of Thomas Sterry Hunt," Transactions of the In- 

 stitute of Mining Engineers, 1892. 



