A System of Mineralogy: Descriptive Mineralogy comprising the most Recent Discoveries

Abstract

FORTY years ago mineralogy was a fashionable subject in England; wealthy people collected minerals, though probably but few of those who did so ever made mineralogy a serious study. But mineralogy, under the then received doctrines of Mohs, was rather a system than a science; rather a system by which the place of a mineral in a classified list, grouped after little else than external appearances, could be determined by a few simple experiments, than a science dealing with the more subtle properties and qualities of the objects it classifies, and treating external resemblances as of no importance unless associated with analogies in composition or chemical type. No doubt it is to a great progress of mineralogy in this latter direction, associated as it has been with a corresponding development of crystallography and crystallographic optics, that the falling off in the votaries of these sciences is in a great measure due.

A System of Mineralogy: Descriptive Mineralogy comprising the most Recent Discoveries.

By James Dwight Dana, Silliman Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in Yale College, etc., aided by George Jarvis Brush, Professor of Mineralogy and Metallurgy in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College. Fifth edition, 8vo. pp. 827, figures 617. (London: Trübner & Co.)