150 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



on the violin and harpsichord. ' This employment," said he with 

 some naivete, " had at least this agreeable quality that it does not 

 permit me to bury my talent for music." Meanwhile his patrons 

 were not idle, and before long Hauy received a scholarship in the 

 College of Navarre, which enabled him to pursue his education in 

 the classics. At Navarre application and intelligence advanced 

 him from the role of student to that of instructor, the gift of teaching 

 which so distinguished his career being thus early recognized and 

 fostered. Here as well under M. Brisson he developed a taste for 

 physical experiments, particularly those relating to electricity. 

 Shortly after attaining his majority and with it his clerical degrees, 

 he entered a broader field of study and teaching at the College of 

 Cardinal Lemoine in Paris. 



Among his colleagues at Paris was numbered Lhomond, the 

 grammarian, whose passion for botany gave to Hauy his first insight 

 into the realm of natural science and by directing his attention to 

 the symmetries of plant life paved the way to those more intricate 

 and beautiful symmetries of crystallization which were to render 

 his name renowned. By a happy accident the Jardin du Roy 

 adjoined the college and proved a favorite scene of the botanical 

 walks of Hauy and his " chosen companion and director of con- 

 science." Thus it was that, noticing on one occasion the crowd of 

 students entering the class of mineralogy conducted by Daubenton, 

 he entered with them and found the real goal of his scientific aspira- 

 tion, the study to which he was to devote his life. Coming to this 

 new world of inorganic shapes, complex and yet regular, fresh from 

 the contemplation of the geometrical symmetry of the forms of 

 plant life, Hauy was struck with the apparent lack of orderly arrange- 

 ment where his scientific instinct had told him order must be. How, 

 he reasoned, can the same stone, the same salt, reveal itself in cubes, 

 in prisms, in points, without changing its composition to the extent 

 of a single atom, while the rose has always the same petals, the 

 acorn the same curve, the cedar the same height and the same 

 development. 



To what extent can we assume that the Abbe Hauy owed his 

 great discovery to an accident? Such accidents are only the guiding 

 threads held out by the hand of Opportunity. We know that in 

 the house of his friend M. Def ranee, Hauy dropped the now historic 

 group of prismatic crystals of calcite and gathered from the ruin 

 of a fine specimen the cleavage pieces, to him recognizable as of the 

 same form as other crystals of calcite, and it appears that he had 



