"Nature doth everywhere geometrize": Crystals, Crystallization, and Crystallography in the Long Eighteenth Century1

"Nature doth everywhere geometrize": Crystals, Crystallization, and Crystallography in the Long Eighteenth Century1 ALAN T. MCKENZIE and ANN T. MCKENZIE The persistent and intricate geometry of crystals, long evident in minerals that could readily be held in the hand and ice and snow that could not, and recently and spectacularly visible under the lens of the microscope, seized the imaginations and challenged the understandings of natural philosophers and writers throughout the long eighteenth century. Crystals brought the materials and forces of nature to the eye and the mind in ways that invited wonder, speculation, experiment, and explanation. Philosophers speculated on matter and form. Natural philosophers—chemists, physicists, metallurgists , and biologists avant la lettre—combined experiments, investigations, and hypotiieses to develop Democritean atoms into corpuscles and scattered observations into a few firm laws. Essayists and encyclopedists conveyed these findings to the reading public, and, on occasion, poets invoked the longadmired symmetrical intricacy and recently discovered scientific complexity of crystals to instinct and delight their readers. In the seventeenth century, crystals inspired scattered investigations and speculations; by the end of the eighteenth century the science of crystallography had been established and named (in French, by Rome de l'lsle, in 1772). Crystals were rightly assumed to offer direct access into the properties and stmcture of matter. They were also then regarded as evidence of the orderliness of God and the balance of nature, and as a worthy challenge to the 209 210 / MCKENZIE & MCKENZIE intelligence of man.2 As we shall see, crystals held a special fascination for scientists of a theological bent. Major contributions were made by a bishop (Steno), a Jesuit (Boscovich), and a priest (Haiiy), while Kepler saw the shape of snowflakes as divine, and Boyle seems to have regarded the laboratory as an outbuilding of the Cathedral. In this period, crystals instilled certainty and devotion in those who beheld or delved into their stmcture. Crystals do not, to the eye, the microscope, or, for that matter, the X-ray crystallographer, exhibit anything like "the corruption of the natural world" that, according to Robert Markley's recent work, so absorbed Boyle and Newton.3 Thus they have never required the elaborate linguistic or political stratagems that he detects. They are, as it were, bits of nature virtually without what Markley calls "noise." Their structures may be said (and will be shown here) to have called forth words and images so commensurate with their structures that, if they weren't "noiseless," they were at least always subject to, and indeed the means of, the careful and continuous adjustment of both words and ideas. Their elaborate, persistent, and striking structures are so much and so evidently their own, that they cannot, we think, be evaporated into "constructs." Here, however, we will concentrate on the place of crystals at the intersection of science and literature, reviewing as much of the science as can be rendered manageable, especially the revisions to assumptions about matter that the increasingly sophisticated study of crystals made necessary. As the geometrical, optical, and chemical properties of crystals became better understood , most of the traditional assumptions about the composition of matter had to be discarded or revised. We will also consider the promulgation of that understanding beyond the laboratory and the scientific treatise into some of the prose and poetry of the age, indicating the books, periodicals, dictionaries , and encyclopedias that conveyed this new and better informed appreciation of crystals and the revised assumptions of matter that went with it to a wide reading public. We will inspect three poems and a dialogue that display this understanding. Two, with which we begin, depict crystallization at work, naturally in the first instance, and purposefully in the second. The remaining poem and the dialogue, both late in the period, are didactic and instructive, conveying information about the conveying of information about crystals. Finally, and very briefly, we will mention the complex and penetrating understanding of matter that has been gained through crystals in the twentieth century, almost all of it based on the investigations and speculations of the eighteenth century. The finest example of crystals fusing the science of the time and the poetry of the earlier period is, not surprisingly...