_Organization of Crystals. Views of Haüy, Delafosse, Bravais, and of
Wallerant._—In botany, zoology, and crystallography we understand by
form an assemblage of material constituents co-ordinated in a definite
system—_i.e._, the organization itself. The body of man, for example,
is an edifice in which sixty trillion cells ought each to find its own
predetermined place.
In crystallography also we understand by form the organization which
crystals present. The grouping of the elements of crystals is, perhaps,
more simple. They are none the less organized, in the same sense that
living bodies are.
Their organization, while more uniform than that of living bodies,
still shows a considerable amount of variation. It should not be
assumed that the area of a crystal is completely filled, with
contiguous parts applied one to the other by plane faces, as might
be supposed from the phenomenon of cleavage which dissociates the
parts of the crystalline body into solids of this kind. In reality,
the constituent parts are separated from each other by spaces. They
are arranged in a quincunx, as Haüy put it, or along the lines of a
network, to use the terms of Delafosse and Bravais. The intervals left
between them are incomparably larger than their diameters. So that in
the organization of a crystal it is necessary to take into account two
quite different things:—An element, the crystalline particle, which
is a certain aggregate of chemical molecules having a determinate
geometrical form; and a more or less regular, parallelopipedic network,
along the edges of which are arranged in a constant and definite manner
the aforesaid particles. The external form of the crystal indicates the
existence of the network. Its optical properties depend upon the action
of the particles, as Wallerant has shown: Thus we must distinguish in
a crystal between two kinds of geometrical figures—that of the network
and that of the particle—and their characters of symmetry may be either
concordant or discordant.
The crystalline particle, the element of the crystal, is therefore
a certain molecular complex that repeats itself identically and is
identically placed at the nodes of the parallelopipedic network. It has
been given different names well calculated to produce confusion-the
crystallographic molecule of Mallard, the complex particle of other
authors. Some have separated this element into subordinate elements
(the fundamental particles of Wallerant and of Lapparent).
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