Thomas Browne holding a fossil at a table laid out with minerals and shells

What kind of creature is a crystal?

Thomas Browne (1605–1682), an English physician and writer, opens his inquiry into crystal with an old explanation for its transparent hardness. Given sufficient cold and time, people had supposed, water could freeze into ice that would never melt again. Put a piece of rock crystal beside a piece of ice and it is easy to see why the idea had so many friends. Browne asks how well the likeness holds when the two are exposed to heat.

What a creation account leaves out

For, though Moses have left no mention of minerals, nor made any other description than suits unto the apparent and visible creation, yet is there, unquestionably, a very large class of creatures in the earth, far above the condition of elementarity.

– Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1890, p. 109.[1]

Ice gives way in the sun. A crystal can retain its transparent structure even in a hot country. In the course of this inquiry Browne notices how little our usual ways of speaking about the earth do justice to what comes out of it. Even the biblical account of creation, he remarks, deals chiefly with what is visible. Anyone relying on it for a name for everything formed underground might miss distinctions that are plain enough once a few different minerals lie side by side.

What Browne means by creatures

The word creatures brings a modern reader up short. In the next sentence Browne turns to plants. He imagines that minerals, too, differ through formative seeds committed to the earth from the beginning. Whether that would make them alive in the same sense as a plant is a question he expressly leaves open. The care with which he makes distinctions extends to a single crystal. Seeing through it and noticing a sparkle on its surface are two different observations for Browne. A single word for everything that shines would have buried the difference.