236 Canadian Record of Science. 
THE Stupy oF MINERALOGY. 
By T. Sterry Hunt, LL.D., F.R.S. 
(Abstract.') 
$ 1. Our knowledge of the inorganic kingdom, as seen in 
this earth, may be comprehended under geography, geology 
and mineralogy; the latter in its wider sense including all 
non-organised forms of matter, with their whole dynamical” 
(physical) and chemical history. In didactic language, 
however, minerology is limited to the study of native spe- 
cies, and includes a knowledge alike of their external char- 
acters and their chemical relations. The so-called natural- 
history method in mineralogy, disregarding these latter, is 
based exclusively on specific gravity, hardness, optical char- 
acters, texture and structure, including crystallization ; 
while the chemical method regards the results of chemical 
analysis alone, and mixed methods consider these in con- 
nection with crystallization, and even endeavour to take 
into account other physical characters. The defects of all 
the methods hitherto devised are obvious, and no system of 
classification can be complete which does not assign a value 
and a place to all characters whatsoever. There exists in 
the nature of things such an interdependence of these, that 
1 Read before ths British Association for the Advancement of 
Science, Bath, 1888. 
2 We use the words dynamics and dynamical in the sense in 
which they are employed by Thomson and Tait in their treatise 
on Natural Philosophy, wherein all those manifestations of force 
which are neither chemical nor vital (biotic), including, besides 
ordinary motion, the phenomena of sound, temperature, radiant 
energy, electricity and magnetism, are embraced under the general 
title of Dynamics, corresponding to what in popular language is 
designated Physics. Other eminent students of our time have 
sanctioned this use of the term dynamics, in which they were to a 
certain extent anticipated by Berzelius, who in 1842 included elec- 
tricity, magnetism, light and heat—all of which he regarded as 
affections of matter, and compared their phenomena with those of 
sound—under the common term of Dynamides. (See Hunt, 
Mineral Physiology and Physiography, p. 13.) 
