T. S. Hunt on the objects and method of Mineralogy. 203 
Art. XXIV.—On the Objects and Method of Mineralogy ; by 
T. Srerry Hunt, F.R.S. 
(Read before the American Academy of Sciences, Jan. 8, 1867). 
MINERALOGY, as popularly understood, holds an anomalous 
position among the natural sciences, and is by many regarded 
as having no claims to be regarded as a distinct science, but as 
constituting a branch of chemistry. This secondary place is dis- 
puted by some mineralogists, who have endeavored to base a 
natural-history classification upon such characters as the crys- 
talline form, hardness, and specific gravity of minerals. In sys- 
us, we must first consider what are the real objects, and what 
the provinces, respectively, of mineralogy, and of chemistry. 
f the three great divisions, or kingdoms of nature, the clas- 
Sification of the vegetable gives rise to systematic botany, that 
of the animal to zoology, and that of the mineral to mineralogy, 
which has for its subject the natural history of all the forms of 
unorganized matter. The relations of these to gravity, cohe- 
Sion, light, electricity, and magnetism, belong to the domain of 
physics; while chemistry treats of their relations to each other, 
and of their transformations under the influences of heat, light, 
and electricity. Chemistry is thus to mineralogy what biology 
1s to organography ; and the abstract sciences, physics and chem- 
istry, must precede, and form the basis of the concrete science, 
mineralogy. Many species are chiefly distinguished by their 
nse, mineralogy takes in not only the few metals, oxyds, sul- 
phids, silicates, and other salts, which are found in nature, but 
also all those which are the products of the chemist’s skill. It 
embraces not only the few native resins and hydrocarbons, but 
all the bodies of the carbon series made known by the researches 
of modern chemistry. 
The primary object of a natural classification, it must be re- 
