II. New researches on the dispersion of the optic axes in harmotome and wöhlerite, proving these minerals to belong to the clinorhombic (oblique) system

We are already acquainted with a considerable number of crystals, natural as well as artificial, the forms of which have only been determined with precision by the examination of their optical properties as doubly refracting bodies. Harmotome and Wöhlerite furnish two fresh examples of this; and they afford all the more important proof of the necessity of appealing to these properties, inasmuch as the crystals of these substances would appear certainly to be derived from a right rhombic prism, so long as we consider only the apparent symmetry of their external forms, or the orientation of the plane containing their optic axes. The different sorts of dispersion which these axes might be capable of presenting are so feeble, and so difficult of appreciation on account of the slight transparency of Wöhlerite, and the complex structure of the crystals of Harmotome, that the determination of these dispersions has hitherto been too incomplete to allow of any conclusion being drawn as to the crystalline type they might otherwise serve to characterize. It was a remark of M. Axel Gadolin that induced the author to resume the attentive study of the phenomena of dispersion, first in Harmotome, and then in Wöhlerite, and as a consequence to modify the crystallographic type to which these minerals have been in general referred.