REPORT ON MINERALOGY. 
323 
established differences and identifications among certain varie¬ 
ties of crystalline bodies. 
But on the other hand, mineralogy cannot be said to have 
been of late a popular science, in that higher sense in which we 
use the phrase, when we apply it to the sciences in which stri¬ 
king advances in theory, new and widening views, and the bright 
promise of future progress, attract the attention of all, learned 
and unlearned,—draw to them the energies of those who feel 
within themselves the vocation of discovery,—and communicate 
a feeling of scientific exultation and hope, even to those who 
have the most imperfect knowledge of the nature of the acqui¬ 
sitions, and of the grounds on which more is expected. Such 
sciences, in our own time, optics, geology, and chemistry have 
been and are; such, at least in our own country, mineralogy of 
late has not been. 
It is not difficult to point out some of the reasons of the com¬ 
paratively slow and undistinguished advance of mineralogy for 
the last few years. Nothing could be more brilliant than the 
prospects which appeared to open themselves to this science a 
few years back, at the epoch of Werner and Haiiy. The Ger¬ 
man Professor gave a fixity and clearness to the determination 
of minerals by external characters, far exceeding anything 
which had been taught before ; he introduced a system of clas¬ 
sification which appeared to lend itself very happily to the 
known relations of minerals; and he announced the possibility 
of distinguishing, by the mineral characters of the mountains 
of the earth, the place which their strata occupied in an invari¬ 
able chronological series, their meaning as the record of remote 
but ascertainable epochs in the physical history of the globe ; 
—an application of mineralogy, which of itself was sufficient to 
give to the study a most attractive dignity and interest. 
The French crystallographer, on the other hand, laid be¬ 
fore his hearers a science which detected the most beautiful 
symmetry, simplicity, and constancy, in the midst of apparent 
complexity and instability; which undertook to determine the 
forms and laws of aggregation of the component atoms of bo¬ 
dies ; and which boasted that, in the most remarkable manner, 
its predictions and suggestions, founded on differences which 
the unassisted eye could not appreciate, had been confirmed by 
the testimony of chemical analysis, summoned as a witness for 
that purpose. It appeared therefore in the highest degree 
probable, that mineralogy would be found to be, on the one 
hand, a necessary vestibule to geology, and on the other, an en¬ 
trance to passages, by which a new way was to be opened to 
the most recondite questions of chemistry and physics. 
