154 NE W YORK STATE MUSEUM 



of fortune, when, under the Restoration, he was deprived of his 

 pension and honors. But no administration, no political reversal 

 could take from him the fame which he had earned or the satisfac- 

 tion of a life well spent in the elevation of the science which he loved. 

 Cuvier has given us a striking picture of the true greatness of the 

 unassuming Abbe of Revolutionary France — sought out by every 

 visitor of distinction who entered Paris, yet never inaccessible to 

 the poorest and humblest student. He never changed the hours 

 of his meager meals, of his rising and retiring, day by day he took 

 the same exercise, he traversed the same streets, losing no oppor- 

 tunity to exercise the small kindnesses and courtesies which so 

 distinguished him, directing strangers whom he found embarrassed 

 by the intricacies of Paris and distributing to them cards of admis- 

 sion to the collections. On his occasional visits to his native village 

 none of his ancient neighbors could detect by his manner that he 

 had in Paris become a person of distinction. 



His death was hastened by a fall which fractured the crown of 

 his thigh bone and resulted in a painful abscess. Despite his condi- 

 tion he labored to the end on a new edition of his Traite de Miner- 

 ologie which appeared in 1823, a year after his death. 



Such was the man whose name we honor today. As to his influ- 

 ence, no one of us who has dipped more than casually into the 

 wonderful science of crystallography has failed to have felt it. 

 Beginning with that admirable mineral species calcite, called by 

 him " the Protheus " among minerals, from a meaningless chaos 

 of unrelated forms he produced an ordered science. To anyone 

 who will consult the literature of mineralogy in the latter half of 

 the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries there 

 will appear a well-marked line of distinction between the old and 

 the new, between those who wrote before Haiiy published his Essai 

 (Tune theorie sur la structure des cristaux and those who succeeded 

 him and profited by his teachings. 



William Phillips, writing in 1823, says: 



" The labors of the Abbe Haiiy have shed over mineralogy a 

 purely philosophical luster which indeed has been one of the chief 

 causes of raising the study to the rank of a science ; this he has done 

 by showing the consonance of the laws of crystallization with rigid 

 calculation: he has proved that in crystallization there is a natural 

 geometry" 



It was as though he took as his motto the inspired words of 

 Gulielmini uttered nearly a century before the publication of his 

 Traite de Mineralogie: 



