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Donato García was the mineralogy professor at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History and Central University of Madrid from 1816 to 1853. In addition to teaching mineralogy, he gathered geological and mineralogical material for didactic purposes, and for exhibitions in the hall of the Cabinet. He was a key figure in developing the subject matter of mineralogy in Spain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Donato Garcia likewise promoted the careers of very important future teachers at the Military Academy of Engineers, Natural Sciences Museums, and Universities, integrating oral lectures, mineral testing, visual recognition, and the use of crystallographic models. This paper investigates how the crystallographic system proposed by Haüy (in the mid-thirties) was assimilated through unpublished documents of Donato García's mineralogical lessons from 1824 to 1825, obtained from Spain's Archivo General de Palacio (Madrid). Hence, this manuscript can be considered the first scientific work reliably attributable to Donato and based on the notes of his pupil José Musso y Valiente, which stands as an early attempt to create a handbook of mineralogy in Spanish. The novel approach to teaching mineralogy is furthermore compared with lessons published by disciple Antonio María Cisneros y Lanuza in 1843. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper presents a brief description of the prevailing ideas and hypothesis about the nature of matter from antiquity to the end of XIX century. It shows how gradually, since the Hauy proposal of the existence of the unit cell, the crystal lattice and symmetry and subsequent derivation of the 14 crystal classes by the French Physicist A. Bravais, the 32 point groups by the German mathematician A. Shoenfliess and the 230 space groups independently deduced by the Russian mathematician E. S. Fedorov and A. Shoenflies confirmed the atomic theory suggested by the Greek philosopher Democritus. These empirical and theoretical findings, conducted by several scientists, are one of the most brilliant theoretical predictions of all time in Science, fully confirmed after von Laue discovery of X-ray diffraction by crystals in 1912 and its application on the determination of molecular and crystalline structure by the English physicists W. H. Bragg (1862-1942) and his son W. L. Bragg (1890-1971).

Charles Darwin analogized the diversification of species to a Tree of Life. This metaphor aligns precisely with the taxonomic system that Linnaeus developed a century earlier to classify living species, because an underlying mechanism-natural selection-has driven the evolution of new organisms over vast timescales. On the other hand, the efforts of Linnaeus to extend his "universal" organizing system to minerals has been regarded as an epistemological misfire that was properly abandoned by the late nineteenth century. The mineral taxonomies proposed in the wake of Linnaeus can be distinguished by their focus on external character (Werner), crystallography (Haüy), or chemistry (Berzelius). This article appraises the competition among these systems and posits that the chemistry-based Berzelian taxonomy, as embedded within the widely adopted system of James Dwight Dana, ultimately triumphed because it reflects Earth's episodic but persistent progression with respect to chemical differentiation. In this context, the pioneering work of Hazen et al. (2008) in mineral evolution reveals that even the temporal character of the phylogenetic Tree of Life is rooted within a Danan framework for ordering minerals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]