240 Ford — Growth of Mineralogy, 1818 to 1918. 



Aet. VIII. — The Growth of Mineralogy from 1818 to 

 1918; by William E. Foed. 



Mineralogy to-day would certainly be generally con- 

 sidered one of the minor members of the group of the 

 Geological Sciences. We commonly look upon it in the 

 light of an useful handmaiden, whose chief function is to 

 serve the other branches, and we are inclined to forget 

 that, in reality, mineralogy was the first to be recognized 

 and, with considerable truth, might be claimed as the 

 mother of all the others. Minerals, because of their fre- 

 quent beauty of color and form, and their uses as gems 

 and as ornamental stones, were the first inorganic objects 

 to excite wonder and comment and we find many of them 

 named and described in very early writings. Theophras- 

 tus (368-284 B. C), a famous pupil of Aristotle, wrote 

 a treatise "On Stones'' in which he collected a large 

 amount of information about minerals and fossils. The 

 elder Pliny (23-79 A. D.), more than three centuries later, 

 in his Natural History, described and named many of the 

 commoner minerals. At this time it was natural {hat no 

 clear distinction should be drawn between minerals and 

 rocks, or even between minerals and fossils. As long as 

 all study of the materials of the earth's crust was con- 

 cerned with their superficial characters, it was logical to 

 include everything under the single head. There were 

 some writers in the early centuries of the Christian era, 

 however, who believed that fossils had been derived from 

 living animals but the majority considered them to be 

 only strange and unusual forms of minerals. During 

 many succeeding centuries little was added to the general 

 store of geological knowledge and it was not until the 

 beginning of the sixteenth century, that any further 

 notable progress was made. Agricola (1494-1555) was a 

 physician, who, for a time, lived in the mining district of 

 Joachimstal. He studied and described the minerals 

 that he collected there. He was the first to give careful 

 and critical descriptions of minerals, of their crystals 

 and general physical properties. Unfortunately, he also 

 did not realize the fundamental distinction between fos- 

 sils and minerals, and probably because of his influence 

 this error persisted, even until the middle of the eigh- 

 teenth century. But, naturally, as the number of scien- 



