138 Machireh Letters, 



therefore perhaps as well leave it for the present, until we 

 have caught nature in the act of forming similar rocks." 



Cupidity of Mineral Dealers. 



The conduct of many European mineral merchants, is in a 

 high degree scandalous and disgraceful. Some of them falsify 

 the locality, exaggerate the scarcity, and enhance the value 

 of all the minerals within their reach, and for the purpose of 

 oblaining a greater price for what they have collected, actu- 

 ally destroy, with the rage of avaricious cupidity, thousands 

 of specimens at the locality, where they were in abundance, 

 concealing, and so disguising the place from whence they 

 came, as to render it difficult for those that follow to procure 

 any more. Such proceedings, hostile alike to science and to 

 common honesty, tend to prolong the reign of ignorance and 

 misery, and to stop the progress of the civilization of mankind, 

 and are ten thousand times more criminal, than the conduct 

 of the Dutch spice merchants, who burned a few cargoes of 

 spices to enhance the value of what remained, as they only 

 pinched our artificial appetites in their indulgence in articles 

 which perhaps did us more harm than good ; whereas the 

 destroyer of what is absolutely necessary to the propagation of 

 knowledge, becomes the active agent of brutal ignorance, the 

 supporter of despotism, bigotry, cruelty, barbarity, and all the 

 other evils that torment mankind. For these evils originate 

 from, and are sustained and propagated by, ignorance, the 

 source and only root, from which spring ail the miseries of 

 the human species. 



I trust that no American mineralogists, or even mineral 

 dealers, will follow such disgraceful examples, or permit the 

 Jove of gain, or any temporary advantage, to tempt them to 

 the perpetration of such crimes. 



European systems of Geology not always applicable to Amer- 

 ican Geology. 



Some foreign geological travellers in America, in endeav- 

 ouring to apply their artificial systems, to our extensive, regu- 

 larly natural, geological arrangement, fall into such errors, as 

 must awaken our young geologists to a proper sense of their 



