The Mineralogical Museum

Palache’s most lasting and most important contribution to the development of the Harvard Department of Mineralogy, and a great service to mineralogy in general, was in building the Mineralogical Museum to its present position as the leading research and exhibit collection of minerals in the world. When Palache first came to Cambridge, a few days before Christmas in 1895, it was to assist Wolff in arranging the mineral collection. Palache lived for a year in a small room in the University Museum where, armed with a rifle, he guarded the premises.

The collection he came to had started in 1784 and in 1895 contained about 55,000 specimens. Wolff continued as Curator until 1922, when he retired and Palache took charge both of the Department and of the Museum. The collection grew rapidly by field collecting, exchange and purchase. The great private collection of A. F. Holden, comparable in quality and extent to the collections of Roebling and Bement, was acquired by gift in 1913. This was followed by very large funds given by A.F. Holden in 1922 and by J. E. Wolff in 1940 for the care and increase of the Museum. Much of the income from these gifts was diverted into the general funds of the University and only a small amount remained for minerals.

Beginning in 1904, Palache gradually built a definitive collection of the minerals of Franklin, N.J. and acquired together with a mass of other material the Hancock collection and, jointly with the U.S. National Museum, the Canfield Collection. His monographic study of the mineralogy of the Franklin ores, published in 1935 by the United States Geological Survey as Professional Paper 180, is a landmark in American Mineralogy. The work at Franklin was part of a lengthy association with the Geological Survey that included field studies in 1901 in the Bradshaw Mountains in Arizona and mineralogical studies in 1906 and 1919-1921 in the Lake Superior copper district.

Palache first became seriously interested in mineralogy and paragenesis of the pegmatites of New England in 1912 although he had earlier described with C.H. Warren the pegmatite pipes of the Quincy granodiorite. In the summer of that year he collected in the pegmatites of Maine and New Hampshire, and secured the fabulous find of the purple apatite at Mount Apatite near Auburn, Maine. During the next 20 years he collected with the assistance of students and of F. A. Gonyer, extensive suites of material from pegmatites throughout New England, in part by leasing operations at important localities. This material served as the basis of important studies by himself and his students. Among these publications was Landes’ well known paper of 1925, "The paragenesis of the granite pegmatites of central Maine." Pegmatite mineralogy was strongly emphasized in Palache’s course on mineral paragenesis, but he also was keenly interested in other types of mineral occurrence and it is a pity that only a small part of his store of knowledge in this field was ever published.

There were numerous other collecting activities, both at home and abroad. In 1922 he participated with R. A. Daly, F. E. Wright and G. A. Molengraaff in an expedition to South Africa, where he obtained a wealth of secondary zinc, copper and vanadium minerals. In 1924 he made a productive trip to localities in Norway and to Langban, Sweden, where the Flink collection was secured. In 1926 he went to Madrid for the XIV International Geological Congress, and to Lisbon, where he acquired the Bello collection of Portuguese minerals. Earlier, he had visited Russia for the VII International Geological Congress in 1897, and he traveled to Alaska in the Harriman Expedition of 1898. In 1935, Palache visited Vienna to purchase 900 superlative specimens from the Karabacek collection, a transaction remembered to this day in Austria. Another large acquisition was the Ahlfeld collection of Bolivian minerals, purchased jointly with the National Museum. The collection of meteorites, originally acquired from J. Lawrence Smith in 1833, was increased as opportunity offered. Palache prepared a new catalogue of the collection, and described five new meteorites.

Numerous publications stemmed from the accessions, and a vast amount of research material remains untouched. There were many indirect yields from the collection. L. C. Graton paid tribute to Palache for his essential aid in assembling the reference collection of polished sections of ore minerals in the mining geology laboratory, that formed the basis of the works of J. Murdoch, C. M. Farnhem and M. N. Short in this field. Palache published joint descriptions with others of 17 new mineral species including the last two rock forming minerals to be recognized, lawsonite and pumpellyite. Lawsonite was originally found by Palache and F. L. Ransome when as students at the University of California they went on a collecting trip to the glaucophane schists of the Tiburon Peninsula. Palache prepared a description of lawsonite in 1894, while working under Groth in Munich, and correspondence brought out that Ransome was working on the mineral in California, both had independently selected the name lawsonite, and a joint description was published in the Zeitschrift fur Kristallogic and Mineralogie. Palacheite, named after him in 1903 by Eakle, was soon discredited as a variety of botryogen.

Palache was a connoisseur of minerals. He could evaluate worth of a specimen as representative of a locality or type of occurrence; he knew the subtleties of crystal habit, color, association and size that distinguish a fine specimen from a good one; he was a keen judge of the factors that determine the aesthetic and scientific values and, of course, he was a master at that virtually lost art, sight identification. Palache took a keen delight in a beautiful specimen, yet with sober deliberation he would yield any specimen to the dissecting chisel and hammer if now knowledge could be obtained. He took painstaking care in the arrangement, cataloguing and labeling of the collection to make it convenient for use by the investigator and the student. Palache’s lectures were enlivened by anecdotes of his personal experiences with other mineralogists or of his visits to famous mineral localities. His students and assistants soon learned of his great knowledge and love of minerals and inevitably became imbued with his interest and spirit of research. The laboratory work was thorough and emphasized the direct examination of specimens. His successive course assistants in the earliest years were A. S. Eakle, C. E. Lord, Hoyt S. Gale, H. O. Wood, R. W. Richards, H. E. Merwin, R. E. Somers, W. G. Foye and A. Wandtke, all of whom went on to distinguished careers.

Palache played an active part in the organization and later development of the Mineralogical Society of America. The Society was first organized on December 30, 1919, in a meeting in the mineralogical lecture room at Harvard, Palache became President of the Society in 1921, Honorary President in 1950, and was the first recipient of the Roebling Medal in 1937. In the words of Edward H. Kraus, the Roebling award was presented to "....America’s foremost mineralogist, and one of the stalwarts of the Society whose publications during a period of 40 years, have covered a wide range of subjects and have contributed signally and enduringly to the advancement of our science." Palache’s acceptance was a delightful account of his friendship with Colonel Roebling and of the circumstances through which he brought the Roebling endowment to the Society. Palache was loath to have relatively large number of contributions from himself and his students and associates impose upon the limited resources of the journal of the Society. This brought the issuance of five independently financed Harvard numbers of the journal, including the Palache Festschrift of 1938, that supplemented the normal contributions of the Department.

The distinction of Palache’s career brought him many honors. Aside from his recognization by the Mineralogical Society of America, he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science, President of the Geological Society of America in 1937, and corresponding member of the Geologiska Poreningen, Stockholm. He was an Honorary Member of many societies, including the Sierra Club, the New York Academy of Science, the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain, the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, and the Society Geologique de Belgique. In 1941 he was give an honorary LL.D by the University of California. He was an associate editor for many years of Zeitschrift fur Krystallographie and of the American Journal of Science. Palache encouraged the efforts of the amateur mineralogists, and was voted an Honorary Member of both the Boston Mineral Club and the New York Mineralogical Society.

In his office and laboratories Professor Palache seemed to many to be stern in attitude and almost forbidding in appearance. He was not easy of approach, although an effort always was rewarding, and he rarely was familiar in his relations with students or his associates. These characteristics may have stemmed from an acute and strongly disciplined shyness and sensitivity. Certainly he was a modest and considerate person, whose kindnesses were unobtrusive. At home he was a relaxed and charming host. He derived great satisfaction from symphonic music, a taste dating to concerts at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig heard as a student. His personal reserve was easily penetrated by discussions of music or through his interest, maintained over the years, in ornithology. Palache married Helen Markham in 1898, and he is survived by three daughters. It was a pleasant privilege to visit his home or his summer place at Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Vigorous in body and mind to the end, he died at his home near Charlottesville, Virginia, to which he had moved from Cambridge a few years before.

Such was the nature of the man, and of his work. Shortly before his death, in conversation with Reginald A. Daly, a friend and associate over many years, Palache remarked that his life had been fruitless – but this is a feeling given in great times, to great men.

Copyright © by the Mineralogical Society of America.

[HY note: a partial bibliography, covering the years 1936-1951, appears in the original.]