Haiiy, Rene-Just

From the days of the Egyptians, when emeralds were a particular favorite of kings, beryl has also been a favored gemstone. It was not until the late eighteenth century that Abbe Rene Just Haiiy (1743—1822), the father of crystallography, studied the crystalline structures and densities of emeralds and beryl and determined that they were the same mineral. At about the same time, in 1798, Louis-Nicolas Vauquehn (1763—1829) discovered that both emeralds and beryl were composed of a new element with four protons in its nucleus. The element was named glucina because of its sweet taste. It was not until the nineteenth century that the metal berylhum was extracted from berylhum chloride (BeCy by chemical reactions. Late in the nineteenth century, E Lebeau (dates unknown) separated the metal by the electrolytic process. 

Rene-Just Haiiy (1743-1822) completed studies on beryl and emerald. Emerald is a naturally occurring green gemstone. Hairy was convinced that these two minerals were nearly identical. He asked a friend, Vau-quelin, to determine the chemical composition of the two minerals. 

The name chromium was suggested by two French chemists, Antoine Francois de Fourcroy (1755-1809) and Rene-Just Haiiy (1743-1822), because chromium forms so many different colored... 

Rene Just Haiiy (1743-1822), in his well-known four-volume work Traite de Mineralogie (Paris, 1801), classified minerals on the type of metals they contain, or, as he would say now, on the type of cations, or the electropositive principle. 

French mineralogist Rene-Just Haiiy is born on February 28 in Saint-Just-en-Chaussee, France. 

Rene-Just Haiiy shows that beryl and emeralds have identical compositions. 

Rene-Just Haiiy dies on June 3 in Paris, France. 

As the eighteenth century came to a close, advances in mineral analyses and chemical theory merged to set the stage for a revolution in mineral taxonomy. Figure 172 is from the 1801 Traite de Mineralogie by abbe Rene Just Haiiy (1743-1822). In this book the amorphous yellow crystals of sulfur and the clear crystalline diamond, as dissimilar as they are, appear together in Plate LXll as... 

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