Philadelphia Academy’s Maryland Mineral Suite Comes Home

I find myself coming up with words like “heinous” and “ignominious,” when contemplating how for more than 50 years the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences ignored and neglected a significant national treasure that happened to be its mineral collection . Over that period, a fair number of the 30 thousand plus specimens therein had decomposed, were pilfered, or crashed into one another amidst rotting storage facilities. Finally, in the early part of the “aught” decade, the Academy decided to sell. John White, former Curator of Minerals at the Smithsonian, wrote in a subsequent digital commentary, that the A cademy’s then president “was dazzled by dollar signs.” The sale took place in 2007