324 
SECOND REPORT-1832. 
This promise has undoubtedly hitherto-not been fulfilled ; on 
the contrary, the mineralogist appears in some measure to have 
been disappointed of the advantages anticipated from both his 
allies, the geologist and the chemist. The former is now far 
from considering the mineralogist as his main supporter: con- 
chology, zoology, botany, hydrography and general physics, 
are held to be at least as important as mineralogy, to the ex¬ 
amination of the strata of the earth; and our geological teachers, 
in a playful spirit of exaggeration, have sometimes said that a 
person may be too good a mineralogist to be a good geologist. 
In his appeals to the chemist, the student of the mineral kingdom 
has always had his claims to assistance allowed; but chemistry is 
very far indeed from having done for him what he might have 
hoped it would do ; not to mention, that the mere chemist sel¬ 
dom bestows a close and technical attention on that peculiar train 
of characters, which is the basis of the mineralogist’s knowledge. 
Instead of our knowing exactly the chemical constitution of 
every mineral species ; of finding chemistry ever ready to con¬ 
firm the arrangements and classifications otherwise made, or if 
not, to offer something steady and unexceptionable in their place, 
we find that now, forty years after Haiiy began to compare the 
results of crystallography and chemistry, we have very few mi¬ 
nerals of which the chemical constitution is not liable to some 
dispute ;—scarcely a single species of which the rule and limits 
are known, or in which two different analyses, taken at random, 
might not lead to different formulas,—and no system of classifi¬ 
cation which has obtained general acceptation, or is maintained, 
even by its proposer, to be free from gross anomalies. 
Berzelius has given to one new mineral species an appellation 
derived from the Greek word for shame , (aicr^yvv),) acknow¬ 
ledging a sort of disgrace to fall upon science from the analysis 
of this mineral; in as much as two of its elements of very dif¬ 
ferent natures (titantic acid and zirconia,) cannot be separated 
so as to determine their relative quantities. If we were to give 
this name to all the kinds of minerals of which the chemist 
cannot tell us the exact constitution, eschynite would be a 
large family instead of a single species. 
This decided check in the progress of the science has, I 
think, without question, very much damped the interest with 
which mineralogy, as a branch of natural philosophy, has been 
looked upon in England. Indeed this feeling appears to have 
gone so far, that all the general questions of the science excite 
with us scarcely any notice whatever. The value of a method 
of classification seems to be looked upon as a point not worth 
discussing ; any one method is considered as good, or as bad, 
