Were the Chinese First to Discover Nickel

Before Cronstedt, minerals had been characterized only by more or less unimportant outer properties ). 

In the new system minerals were classified according to their composition, determined by chemical analysis. He summarized his new views in a book 1758, which in 1770 was translated into Enghsh with the title Attempt at Mineralogy or the Arrangement of the Mineral Sphere. 

The translator was Gustaf von Engestrom (1738-1813), BrandFs successor as manager of the Laboratorim Chymicum. 

It seems strange that in the middle of the 18 century it was possible to build a system based on chemical analysis. For a chemist in the 21 century, used to spectral analysis. X-ray fluorescence analysis and atomic absorption spectrophotometry, it is difficult to understand how, at that time, it was possible to say much about the composition of a specific mineral, but in Sweden it was possible. The method was blowpipe analysis, described in Chapter 10 Blowpipe and Spectroscope. 

In 1820 Berzelius wrote Cronstedt, the founder of the chemical system of mineralogy, a man who by his acuteness in that science rose so far above his age that he was never correctly understood by it, used the blowpipe to distinguish between minerals . 

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