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The development of the first wooden crystal models for teaching purposes is a little-known chapter in the early history of mineralogy and crystallography. René-Just Haüy, the father of modern crystallography, produced several large sets of models based on his idealized crystal drawings; only two of those sets survive today. Careful measurements show that his models are accurate and true representations of identifiable minerals
INTRODUCTION
In 1918 me Mineralogical Society of America celebrated the 1 75th anniversary of the birth of Abbé René-Just Haiiy with a symposium (Kunz et al., 1918). The 200th anniversary was celebrated by the Société française de Minéralogie in Paris in 1944 (Lacroix, 1944). Both symposia highlighted Haiiy's life, his genius in offering a theory explaining the geometry of crystals, his work in physics and his work in founding the modern science of crystallography.
Haiiy's theory of the geometry of crystals was presented to the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, France in 1784. It is now formulated as die second law of crystallography (me Law of Rational Indices). His Traité de Minéralogie, published in 1801, provided me first rational system for classifying and identifying minerals. In its five volumes Haiiy compiled the harvest of 20 years of his own research with all known historical, physical and chemical data, and the results of other researchers for each mineral studied. It contained a nomenclature, using Lavoisier's new chemistry, as well as an ordering of the minerals into classes and genera. However, its true value lay in the descriptions and drawings of the crystals. The drawings and the accompanying interfacial angles of the crystals provided a method of species identification.
None of the lectures in the two commemorative symposia mentioned that Haiiy had created still another aid to mineral identification: his collections of wooden models representing all of the described mineral crystals. The existence of those collections seems to have been forgotten, though they played an important role in teaching mineralogy throughout the 19th century. When original collections of wooden models became scarce, early in that century, duplicates were created by Mathieu Alexandre Allizeau (1771-1823?) in Paris and Nathaniel John Larkin (1781-1855) in London. In the second half of the 1800s, Dr. August Kranz in Bonn offered sets of duplicates (Krantz, 1862). Of...