Abstract
The work of tile late Hermann Vogelsang, and the subsequent researches of O. Lehmann and other observers, have done much to show that a careful study of the rudimentary forms of crystallisation may prove as valuable to the mineralogist as that of embryology has already been to the comparative anatomist.It is, indeed, difficult to form any clear conception of the manner in which a crystallite originated, nor can we go further back in the history of its development than a stage in which a number of atoms have been grouped in an arrangement about which there is yet no certainty, thus forming molecules grouped in some manner about which we are equally uncertain. We can but imagine that there is some inherent property in molecules which causes them, under given conditions, to group themselves in an orderly manner and to assume a form which may, when more fully developed, be referred to one of the recognlsed crystallographic systems.

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