Abstract
The histories of crystallography and mineralogy have been comparatively neglected by historians and philosophers of science. Recently, however, this state of affairs has begun to change with the appearance of a number of books and smaller monographs by historians of science. There is general consensus that the work of the French scientist René-Just Haüy (1743–1822) marked a watershed in the development of these fields. Haüy devised the first comprehensive quantitative model of crystal structure;1 subsequently he turned to mineral classification and developed a system whose basic unit, the species, was dependent upon his theory of crystal structure. With these achievements, crystallography and perhaps mineralogy are considered to have reached scientific maturity.
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Notes
René-Just Haüy, Essai d’une théorie sur la structure des crystaux (Paris, 1784).
John G. Burke, Origins of the Science of Crystals (Berkeley, 1966), p. 9.
Ibid., p. 107.
Norma E. Emerton, The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form (Ithaca, 1984), pp. 284–285. The quotations are taken from an anonymous review of Henry Brooks’s A Familiar Introduction to Crystallography in Annals of Philosophy, 1823.
Hildesheim, 1984.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d. edn. (Chicago, 1970).
Crystals and Compounds (Philadelphia, 1976).
1st edn., 5 vols. (Paris, 1801).
Burke, Origins, p. 102.
Ibid., p. 69, paraphrasing J.-B. Rome de l’Isle, the first scientist to enunciate the law in 1783.
David Oldroyd, From Paracelsus to Haüy: The Development of Mineralogy in Its Relation to Chemistry (Ph.D. dissertation, University of New South Wales, 1974)
David Oldroyd, ‘Mineralogy and the “Chemical Revolution”’, Centaurus (1975), 19: 54–71.
Schütt, Die Entdeckung, pp. 59–60. The only opponents he lists are J.-F. d’Aubuisson and E.-C. Kramp in France, T. Thomson in England and C. S. Weiss in Germany. In another connection, he also cites the chemist C.-L. Berthollet, pp. 98–104. Schütt’s finding is a significant one which merits close scrutiny.
2d. edn., 5 vols. (Paris, 1822).
3 vols. (Paris, 1822).
Quoted in Mauskopf, Crystals and Compounds, p. 31. Mitscherlich later modified the second part of this law to take into account the chemical nature of the constituents.
Ibid. To the best of my knowledge, Mitscherlich never articulated a theory of crystal structure. But implicit in his formulation of isomorphism and polymorphism was, at the least, a negation of Haüy’s theory of compound molecular structure: no longer could the compound or integrante molecule be envisioned as formed by the juxtaposition of determinately shaped constituent molecules in only one arrangement.
A. Dufrenoy, Traité de minéralogie, 4 vols. (Paris, 1855–1856), I, p. 202.
G. Delafosse, Nouveau cours de minéralogie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1858)
A. de Lapparent, Cours de minéralogie, 3d. edn. (Paris, 1899), p. 7.
Quoted in Mauskopf, Crystals and Compounds, p. 39.
Ibid., Chapter 4.
Ibid., pp. 74–75.
Ibid., pp. 69–70.
Delafosse, Nouveau cours, I, p. 513.
A. Bravais, Études cristallographiques (Paris, 1866), pp. 204–205.
A. de Lapparent, ‘Notice nécrologique’, Annales des Mines, 9m ser. (1895) 7:277
In his necrology, G. Wyrouboff wrote of how Mallard “a transformé - je dirais presque revolutionné - la cristallographie”. “François-Ernest Mallard”, Bulletin de la Sociétie Française de Minéralogie (1894), 17: 243.
E. Mallard, Traité de cristallographie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1879, 1884), I, p. i.
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Mauskopf, S.H. (1988). Molecular Geometry in 19th-Century France: Shifts in Guiding Assumptions. In: Donovan, A., Laudan, L., Laudan, R. (eds) Scrutinizing Science. Synthese Library, vol 193. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2855-8_6
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