306 ON THE NATURAL HISTORY
minerals at the British Museum, has confessed, with reference
to this science, that "The pages of its text-books are sprinkled
with wonderful formulae designed by perverse chemists, and with
unpronounceable hieroglyphics maliciously invented by cruel
crystallographers."1
With regard to the county of Essex it must be conceded
that its mineralogy is of so meagre a character as to be far less
attractive than its botany or its zoology. It may even be
thought that minerals stand to Essex rather in the relation of
snakes to Iceland. The case is hardly so bad as this, but still I
am bound to confess that the mineralogist who visits Essex must
not come hither with the expectation of finding himself in a
happy hunting ground.
"This county," said Morant, "not having any large and
high mountains, the usual parents and beds of Metals and Minerals,
none of these are therefore to be look'd for here."2 However, on
the very next page of his work, in referring to the "Fossils of
Essex" (and of course using the word "Fossil" in the compre-
hensive sense in which it was commonly used in his day—and
with perfect etymological justification—so as to include minerals)
he tells us that "what is found in greatest quantity is the
Copperas stone or Pyrites." That is a statement which could
hardly be improved by the best naturalist of the twentieth
century, for it remains true to-day that in our meagre list of
the minerals of Essex Pyrites occupies the first place.
And yet, curiously enough, this common mineral has some-
times been overlooked. In 1868 the late Mr. Townshend Hall,
a personal friend of mine, published a work under the title of a
Mineralogist's Directory, giving a list of British minerals arranged
county by county. Under the heading of "Essex" there is no
mention of Pyrites—the mineral products of the county being
limited, according to this writer, to a single species—Gypsum,
and its variety Selenite.3
The two minerals to which I have just referred—pyrites and
gypsum—are almost the only well-marked species of which our
county can boast, and the few observations which I am about to
1 Presidential Address to the Mineralogical Society, Mineralogical Magazine, vol. viii.
(1889), p. 141.
2 The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, 1768. Introduction, p. xxv.
3 The Mineralogist's Directory, or a Guide' to the Principal Mineral Localities in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. By Townshend M. Hall, London, 1868.
(Essex p. 61.)