(Dana's Textbook of Mineralogy, 1947, by Edward Salisbury ...)
Dana's Textbook of Mineralogy, 1947, by Edward Salisbury Dana. Also known as A Textbook of Mineralogy with an Extended Treatise on Crystallography and Physical Mineralogy. This is the 4th Edition, revised and enlarged by William E. Ford. Hardcovover book with 851 pages, published by John Wiley & Sons.
Edward Salisbury Dana was an American mineralogist, physicist and professor of physics at Yale. He authored the Textbook of Mineralogy and the sixth edition of the System of Mineralogy. Dana had also been directing force for upward of forty years of the American Journal of Science.
Background
Edward Salisbury Dana was born on November 16, 1849 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the eldest of six children. His father, James Dwight Dana, was one of the foremost geologists and the outstanding mineralogist of his generation. The elder Dana carried on the work in these fields begun by Benjamin Silliman, who was the first to occupy a chair in the natural sciences in Yale College. Silliman's daughter, Henrietta Frances, was married to James Dwight Dana, and their son Edward became the last in a notable "dynasty" that served American science for a hundred and thirty years.
Education
Edward Dana began his education at the Hopkins Grammar School of New Haven, graduated from Yale College in 1870, pursued graduate studies at Yale, Heidelberg, and Vienna, and took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Yale in 1876.
Career
Stimulated by study of new techniques in Europe, Dana began during his graduate student years research work that led to a long list of publications, most of which deal with minerals. Among the best-known of his papers are several prepared jointly with George J. Brush, mineralogist in the Sheffield Scientific School, describing new species of minerals from Connecticut. Dana's books, however, brought him the widest recognition. In 1877 he published A Text-book of Mineralogy. For fully ten years he was engaged in the arduous task of rewriting the System of Mineralogy, the great work first published by his father in 1837, which had already gone through five editions and had served as the "bible of mineralogists, " in all countries, for half a century. The sixth edition, brought out by Edward Salisbury Dana in 1892, was made necessary not only by the discovery of numerous new minerals in the preceding quarter century, but also by the growing importance of optical methods in the investigation of minerals. Use of these new methods involved laborious recalculations for the hundreds of common forms, and the resulting volume, containing more than eleven hundred pages of detailed reference matter, was essentially new. The new System was his outstanding achievement. Even if he had made no other contribution, this one monumental work would have given him high rank as a mineralogist.
Surprisingly, Dana's major subject of instruction at Yale was physics. Although he taught small classes in mineralogy, there was no opening for his promotion in that field. During his earlier years in the faculty he gave instruction in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1890 he was made professor of physics, which title he held until his retirement in 1917. His versatility in science is indicated by the publication, in 1881, of his excellent and successful work, A Text Book of Elementary Mechanics.
His health required careful attention during the last forty years of his life. The exacting labor of preparing the sixth edition of the System of Mineralogy took a toll from which his physique never entirely recovered. Frail health curtailed all later plans for research and limited his intellectual activities chiefly to teaching and to editing the American Journal of Science, the journal founded in 1818 by Benjamin Silliman.
Achievements
Edward Dana made important contributions to the study of minerals, especially in the field of crystallography. His two most important publications in the field were his Textbook of Mineralogy (1877), which went through four editions and long remained the leading English textbook in the subject, and the monumental sixth edition of his father's System of Mineralogy (1892), which remarkable quality was attested by its world-wide recognition as a standard reference work for more than forty years, without modification except by publication of two supplemental "appendices" prepared under Dana's direction in 1899 and 1909.
Dana was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1884 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was an elected member of scientific societies in Austria, Mexico, Russia, England, Scotland, and across the United States.
Personality
Dana's personality was exceptionally attractive. Students and colleagues found him unfailingly companionable, kindly, and considerate. His generosity, always conspicuous in his home community, was extended to his old masters and friends in Vienna when they were in straitened circumstances following the First World War, and brought from them a grateful tribute on his eightieth birthday. He was fond of the outdoors and keenly interested in all natural things, particularly trees and flowers. Even during his last years he was a familiar figure walking along the streets and in the parks of New Haven, with vigorous step and ruddy countenance.
Connections
Dana was married on October 2, 1883 to Caroline Bristol of New Haven. They had three children: Mary Bristol, James Dwight, and William Bristol
