 |
|
|
generally meets the third Wednesday of each month, August through May. January - May 2026: Meetings at Boal Hall (Boalsburg Fire Hall, 113 East Pine St., Boalsburg PA 16827). Google Map: Boal Hall All are welcome to attend our meetings! Parents must provide supervision of minors. Mineral collectors and rockhounds, earth scientists and dinosaur lovers will all enjoy our activities. |
|
LOST & FOUND NOTE THE NEW MAY MEETING DATE May 13th NMS meeting: Ordering Minerals Through Time by Dr. Peter J. Heaney Professor Emeritus of Mineral Sciences Penn State Dept. of Geosciences Boal Hall (Boalsburg Fire Hall), 113 East Pine St, Boalsburg PA 16827 Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/gtHjdzUgXbN9b5J8A 7:45 to 8:00 p.m.: Announcements, door prizes, sales about 8:00 p.m.: featured program The event has free admission, free refreshments and free parking (lot just east of Fire Hall along East Pine St.), and is open to all; parents/guardians must provide supervision of minors. Bring your friends and share an interesting evening. Download an NMS May 13th meeting flyer PDF for printing. Benjamin Waterhouse was one of three founding professors of the Harvard Medical School in 1782. He is chiefly remembered as the first doctor in this country to vaccinate for smallpox, but he also offered the country’s first college course in mineralogy and natural history. In 1807, however, Waterhouse was ousted from the faculty when the Harvard president, Samuel Webber, performed a surprise inspection of the mineral cabinet and discovered a state of utter chaos. Six or seven hundred of the 1600 specimens were without labels, and 68 specimens were missing altogether. The reasons for Waterhouse’s dismissal ran deeper than mineralogical mismanagement. Waterhouse was a Republican and a Quaker in a close-knit New England community of Federalists and Unitarians. Waterhouse also published anonymous but ill-disguised screeds against Harvard’s Board of Overseers in local newspapers. Nevertheless, the episode highlights a real challenge that confronted natural historians at the turn of the 19th century. How were unknown minerals to be identified and ordered? Are minerals best grouped through a single classification scheme that captures some kind of “natural truth”? Or can minerals be categorized by a multiverse of equally valid but philosophically distinct rules? 
In this talk, I will survey the shifting landscape of mineralogical classification schemes in the early 19th century, including systems that focused on external characters (Werner), crystallography (Haüy), and chemistry (Berzelius). I will argue that the widely adopted system of James Dwight Dana ultimately triumphed not due to superiority in ease of use or clarity. Rather, in the same way that the Linnean taxonomy for living organisms embodies Darwinian evolution, the Dana system incorporates Earth’s planetary history as an episodic but persistent progression in chemical differentiation.
Some online presentations of interest: -------------------------- From NMS: Videos of many of our programs since 2020 are available here (updated April 2026). -------------------------- From other sources: Jeri Jones' Zoom Rock Room: Weekly Zoom geology presentations, mostly related to Pennsylvania. https://www.youtube.com/@jerijones4202. The staff of the Penn State Earth & Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery maintains a Facebook page. They also have videos on YouTube: Museum Gallery Tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jJ4NR4ICoc Minerals Day October 12, 2026 National Fossil Day October 14, 2026 Earth Science Week October 11-17, 2026 Minerals Day https://mineralsday.org// by Mineralogical Society of America, and National Fossil Day by the National Park Service will take place during Earth Science Week organized by American Geosciences Institute, October 11 - 17, 2026, celebrating the theme "Critical Minerals for a Thriving Society." Educational materials will be available. Videos of the 2020 Dallas Mineral Collecting Symposium are still available by following the links at https://www.dallassymposium.org/2020-dmcs/. VIRTUAL FIELD TRIPS, TOURS, GALLERIES, COURSES, MORE! With thanks for many of these to AFMS April 2020 Newsletter and Three Rivers Gem & Mineral Society of Fort Wayne Indiana's The Strata Data newsletter. Smithsonian Scroll down to see the tips before starting a tour. Yale - Peabody Museum of Natural History Via Rock & Gem magazine web site (thanks go to them); scroll down to find the image that links to the tour. South Dakota School of Mines & Technology - Mosasaur at Museum of Geology Scroll down to 'YouTube Playlist" Houston Museum of Natural Science Dinosaurs! Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks & Minerals Society of Mineral Museum Professionals (SMMP) Curator's Pick Gallery Curators choose their favorite specimens. Hosted by Mindat. SMMP Wulfenite Gallery Geology of the National Parks Penn State GEOSC 10 virtual field trips American Southwest Virtual Museum Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules Click on Displays at upper right Davidson Institute of Science Education, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has links to several more museum virtual tours worldwide, including natural history museums. Podcast of GEOL-101 type lectures (podcasts #1 to 28). Videos linked from the web site also; all by Nick Zentner of Central Washington University. For additional current news see our NMS Bulletin (link at top of sidebar at left). |
 NMS has in stock T-shirts in Galapagos blue, Texas orange (both shown here) and others. 
A station at our Minerals Junior Education Day 
2020: CELESTINE: Pennsylvania State Mineral?See also Nov. 2020 Bulletin. 
Collecting crystals in a quarry 
We have NMS posters for sale! |
|
| ||