Unexpected Treasures in Thin Section:Part 1:
Alexis A. Julien & Frank J. Keeley

By Tony Nikischer
Excalibur Mineral Corp.

When we purchased the excess stock from the Julius Weber collection in 2005 (see Mineral News Vol. 21, No. 12), we knew that it would take several years to fully unpack and sort through this lifetime of accumulated material. There were hundreds of boxes and trays containing partially mounted material, unmounted specimens, fossils and “mystery minerals” among the four truckloads of crates and boxes we crammed into our already over-crowded warehouse. Now, nearly two years later, we are still unpacking and stumbling across little treasures and surprises among the flotsam and jetsam of many decades of stockpiled “stuff”.

One such surprise recently uncovered was an assortment of old thin sections. For those unfamiliar with thin section preparation and use, there are a number of references available on the internet and in most geology libraries that will carry you through the basics. But in a nutshell, a rock is sliced to yield thin (~30 micron) slivers which are mounted on glass slides and then carefully polished, sometimes finished with a glass cover slip applied on top. When viewed though a petrographic microscope, particularly through plane polarized light, a riot of interference colors often leap out at the viewer. Much can be told about rock textures and mineral assemblages through the use of thin sections, and they are still widely used today by petrologists and field researchers.

What was exciting about these newly uncovered slides, however, was the fact that many of these appeared to be quite old, prepared with great care by petrology artists of many years ago. The history and provenance of mineral specimens are often anchored by the historic labels that accompany them, and the labels can often add more value to an acquisition than the specimen itself. Like the collecting of old mineral labels, there was considerable history to be found in these carefully labeled thin sections!

As an aside, most modern thin sections are rather antiseptic affairs: some provide only an etched number with meaning to the preparer only, others may include the name of the rock or mineral shown, some even with a locality as well. It is rare to find a nicely labeled sample that also gives some hint of who the preparer was. In the case of the Weber thin sections, their art and history proved as interesting as the specimens!

Among the many slides unearthed from the collection, there were about a dozen identified preparers, and I decided to try to find out more about each of them. Who were these people? When did they actively work on such painstaking chores? What tidbits of history and provenance could I add to the specimens that might increase their interest and/or value? One by one, some obscure (to me) names began to take on life:

Alexis A. Julien

The first name to be tackled proved to be a fascinating one. Julien was born in 1840 and was a graduate of Union College in Pennsylvania, receiving his A.B. degree there in 1859, later earning his A.M. from there as well. One of his early career exploits was resident chemist on the guano island of Sombrero, a tiny 95 acre rock that lies in the Lesser Antilles about 150 miles east of St. Thomas (Virgin Islands). The island was about one mile long and a quarter as wide, and Julien spent four years there during active phosphate mining in the early 1860’s. Now known more for its lighthouse that guides ships passing from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea, Sombrero apparently provided other opportunities for the young Alexis Julien. He was subsequently commended for supplying bird samples to the Smithsonian and for dutifully reporting meteorological observations during his four years on the tiny island. It was remarked that “only a student of nature would be entrusted with the proper filling out of the "Registry of Periodical Phenomena" for the Smithsonian. One wonders if any of his ornithological samples from Sombrero still reside in the vast tombs of our National Museum!

However, Julien’s main interest was rocks, not birds, and he returned to New York to take on a faculty position at Columbia University’s School of Mines in 1865. He remained on staff for more than forty years, retiring in 1907. From 1895 until his retirement, he was also curator of geology at that prestigious school. It was during his tenure at Columbia that Julien came into his own as a well known “rock man”.

His expertise was building stones, and it was he who coordinated that section of the tenth U.S. census that dealt with building stone use. He wrote extensively on the subject, using New York City’s many buildings to describe the use, care and decay of many rock types. His piece de resistance was a lengthy series of articles published in the monthly The Manufacturer and Builder from 1890 through 1891 in which he dissected limestone, granite, gneiss, marble, sandstones and many other ornamental stones, discussed their uses, quarrying methods, durability and decay, as well as their preservation.

Alexis Julien also wrote and lectured extensively beyond his building stone expertise, discussing such topics as the glaciation of the Shawangunk Mountains, NY. (Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. III, 1883-84), volcanic tuffs of Challis, Idaho, and other western
localities. (Trans. of the New York Academy of Sciences, Dec. 1881), a study of the structure of fulgurites (Journal of Geology, Vol. 9, 190), examination of carbon dioxide in fluid cavities of topaz (J. Am. Chem. Soc.; 1881; 3(4) pp 41 – 53), dunyte-beds of North Carolina (Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, Dec. 6, 1882), the fissure-inclusions in the fibrolitic gneiss of New Rochelle, N.Y. (American Quarterly Microscopical Journal, Jan.,
1879), and many other topics.

He was also a member of many academic societies, and at one time was Vice President of the New York Academy of Science. For a New York City kid such as myself, little did I know that Julien was also a key player in the preservation efforts of one of this city’s favorite monuments, the Central Park obelisk, commonly called Cleopatra’s Needle (but having absolutely nothing to do with Cleopatra!) that sits directly behind the world famous Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The story of the obelisk itself is a marvelous one, as it is one of two that were constructed of Aswan pink granite circa 1450 B.C. They once stood on either side of the portals to the Temple of the Sun in the sacred city of Heliopolis on the Nile River. Weighing over 200 tons each, the obelisks remained in Heliopolis until the Romans, under Emperor Augustus, performed an engineering feat by shipping them intact down the Nile River to Alexandria circa 12 B.C. Egyptian antiquities, including the two obelisks, were traded to Great Britain, the United States and other western nations in exchange for foreign aid in the late 1870’s. One of the obelisks now sits on banks of the Thames River in London, and the other arrived in New York in 1881.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation cites its arrival thusly: “The Obelisk’s trip from Egypt to New York was a complicated engineering feat. The delicate moving process required laborers to inch the monument on parallel beams, aided by roll boxes and a pile-driver engine. It took nineteen days just to cross the 86th Street transverse road, and it took another twenty days to move it from Fifth Avenue to its resting place on Greywacke Knoll due to a winter blizzard. All together, it took one hundred and twelve days from the time the Obelisk touched upon the banks of the Hudson River until it reached this place. A huge crowd was on hand for the turning of the obelisk upright on January 22, 1881. A crowd of thousands stood in the snow to watch the event. As reported in the New York World, “Bonfires had been built on each side, and the scene was most picturesque as the huge mass of 220 tons swung majestically from the horizontal to the vertical position.”
Julien, however, felt that the condition of the monument needed attention, and he urged that the obelisk be capped and the hieroglyphics be redone and gilded to mimic the splendor of the original work of some 3300 years earlier. He published a lengthy article entitled The Misfortunes of an Obelisk that appeared in the Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, (Vol. 25, (1893) pp. 66-137), and repeated his urgings in New York Times letters well into 1898. These stirred a modest controversy in the city, as there was much resentment about the amount of money to be spent on such a lavish endeavor. Although the obelisk received several treatments consisting of hot paraffin coatings during this period, it was not until 1914 that a major restoration was undertaken.
Julien retired from his position at Columbia in 1907, and he died in Massachusetts on May 7, 1919 at the age of 79. Hence, a chance encounter with a few of his labeled thin sections has led to a greater appreciation of the man responsible for their preparation, and it has added significant value to what many might consider just antique curiosities. Who will remember the stories and accomplishments of men like Alexis Julien unless we research, preserve and re-tell them to others?

Frank J. Keeley

Another thin section preparer, F.J. Keeley, was the only one of this studied group to date his slides, the one shown here from December 8, 1908. Keeley was born in 1868 and was active as a naturalist in the true sense of the word, contributing papers and microscopical studies from biological objects such as diatoms to field collecting and chemical analysis of minerals and micromounts.

Keeley’s interests were diverse, but all were centered around his proficiency with optical instruments. For example, in 1901, he presented a lecture on the History of Development of the American Microscope to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia where he was initially a conservator. Keeley also published articles about diatoms and other biological topics (eg. Eggs of a Mite in Empty Capsules of Orthotrichum pusillum - The Bryologist, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Mar., 1913), pp. 18-19). His abilities in optical mineralogy were also demonstrated in commentary found in such places as the Proceedings of the Academy in 1904 where it was stated that he had succeeded in showing that unknown crystal inclusions in quartz had double-refractive qualities that he determined by placing a section between two Nichol's. Micromounting became an intense interest as well, as we will see later.

Genth’s 1888 publication of the new mineral lansfordite was the result of Keeley’s co-discovery of the mineral with D.M. Stackhouse, with Keeley credited for the chemical analysis of the mineral. He also described the Deal (L6) meteorite from Monmouth Co., New Jersey in 1920. He was clearly a man of many talents! In 1922, his one-time protégé, Sam Gordon, named the mineral keeleyite from the San Jose Mine in Bolivia in his honor. Unfortunately, it was later discredited by Vaux and Bannister in 1938 as identical to zinkenite.

Keeley was a man of some import, and he held the position of Curator of the Vaux Collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (the proverbial “now turning over in his grave” would certainly apply here based on the Academy’s recent, shoddy treatment of its public trust!). He was a life member of the Academy, served as council member for many years, and was eventually elected to the Board of Trustees. In fact, Keeley was so well respected in microscopy circles that Simon Gage’s Microscopy in America (1830-1945) treatise that was presented in the Transactions of the American Microscopical Society, (Vol. 83, No. 4), mentioned that Keeley was the first customer of the A.H. Thomas company. This new optical instrument company was a venture of Thomas, Lentz, Baush (of B&L fame) and others, all optical giants of their day. Touting Keeley as their first client was important to them, and it was a reflection of Keeley’s own renown!

To many mineral collectors, Keeley will be remembered as a prolific micromounter, and he was posthumously elected to the Micromounters Hall of Fame in 1986. During his long and active career, he was a contemporary of Clarence Bement, G.W. Fiss, Lazard Cahn, and others, and he acquired many specimens from each of them, including significant biological collections such as the Smith diatom collection. Frank Keeley died in 1949, and his extensive collections were eventually left to the Leidy Microscopy Society in Philadelphia.

(To be continued…)

In order to leave comments to this article, you must be registered