Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/413

Rh passage from the stone to the animal; and, although I am not in absolute accord with him in all his conclusions, we agree in the most essential points.

These studies are not of yesterday, and, as is the case with many other branches of knowledge, it is hard to go back to the first person who entered upon them. No branch of science is born in a day; but they all come to their growth in the minds of men and of masses of men by a kind of infiltration, or slow and often unconscious accretion. In 1867 M. Bombicci, Professor of Mineralogy in the University of Bologna, became especially interested in phenomena relating to minerals. Some of his experiments in crystallography were of particular interest, and were marked with the stamp of a rare originality of conception. But he treated the problems they suggested with great boldness, and carried his speculations upon them, perhaps, beyond the limits of rigorous science. It fell to M. Pilo's lot not to institute new experiments, but to collect those of M. Bombicci, his master and friend, correct and edit them, prune them of what about them was too technical, and, checking them with new facts duly substantiated, to present them in a more modest aspect, better deserving to attract attention. M. Pilo has given, in a kind of list, the analogies between the organic and inorganic kingdoms, and has concluded from them that there exists a kind of mineral biology. His memoir, aside from its philosophical parts, is a comparative chart of organic biology and mineral biology, and shows that all the branches of studies relating to organic beings can also be applied to minerals.

He begins by defining life as the state of integration of matter when it, departing from the simply molecular condition, arrives at the state of forming complex groups of determined chemical and physical structure, and becomes capable of reacting upon the ambient medium in such a way as to assimilate to itself the elements peculiarly suitable to it. The individual being a determinate chemical compound under a determinate form, the elementary crystal presents all the characisticscharacteristics [sic] of individuality, comprising of them, under the name of crystal, all that has been called, with certain differences of significance, the integrant molecule by Haüy, the physical molecule by Delafosse, or the elementary crystalline stitch of the crystalline network by Bravais. I do not think that, even admitting this definition, we have any right to deny individuality to bodies that are called amorphous. It is not becoming to adopt the exclusiveness of the old mineralogy, which assumed to occupy itself only with the minerals existing in the bosom of the earth, and regarded as of its domain salt when it was found in mines, but refused to study the chloride of sodium which was produced in a laboratory. Amorphousness is still only a condition of form, and it would be absurd to give individuality to a gramme of crystallized sulphur, and refuse it when the same gramme of sulphur, having been fused, has been cooled in a vessel of water. The word