Rock of Science
Mineral Collection & Education
Rock of Science is a private mineral collection, assembled over sixty years from collecting sites and dealers around the world.
What it sets out to do is simple: show each specimen clearly, and explain what it actually is. The chemistry, the geology, the place it came from. A collection that teaches as much as it shows.
Today, Rock of Science brings together 104 specimens from 31 countries, representing 88 mineral species — documented through 471 photographs and 13 videos.
A Life in Minerals
The First Stone
I came up in the Maine-et-Loire, in the stretch of the Loire Valley that French kings once called their garden. Good soil. It still makes some of the best white wine in the world, which tells you the kings knew what they were about. My people were schoolteachers, and in our house a word was worth as much as a thing. That is probably where I learned to look hard at something before I had any business naming it.
I found my first quartz myself, out between Angers and nowhere in particular. I was seven, or close enough. The thing had no right to be that precise. Nature does not usually bother. I put it in my pocket and, near as I can tell, I never took it back out.
Then came the fossils. The quarries by Angers, the dirt roads near Le Mans. Shark teeth pried out of limestone. Trilobites that five hundred million years had somehow forgotten to grind up. By fourteen I had widened my range: ammonites in Germany, gone to pyrite, and insects shut up in old Provençal resin, still holding the pose they died in.
That was sixty years ago. The curiosity has not aged a day.
What Science Taught Me to See
I spent my working life in research. Immunology, mostly. A laboratory teaches a man one thing before it teaches him anything else: do not trust what the surface is willing to show you.
A mineral can be handsome in two different ways, and they are not the same animal. The first kind speaks up for itself. Color, shape, light coming through clean. You do not need a word of explanation, and you would not thank anyone for offering one.
The second kind keeps quiet. Two or three minerals sharing one piece of rock, each grown under its own conditions, each having found the others across more time than a mind can decently hold. You cannot see that. You have to understand it. And it takes hold of me just as hard.
The Meeting
A collection grows in silence for a long time before anyone else sees it. Mine might have stayed that way, were it not for Charles Camarda, of Camarda Visual Studio, whose work had brought him into the research institute where I worked. We became friends. When he saw the specimens, he wanted to photograph them, and I understood at once why they deserved it. The photographs on this site, the videos, and the site itself all came from that meeting. Through Minerals Photography, the studio’s practice devoted to mineral collections, he photographed every stone and built the site around them.
Knowledge That Must Move
Knowledge you keep to yourself is only half alive, and the dead half spoils first. My parents handed theirs to children. I handed mine to doctoral students and the ones who came after. Same motion exactly: what you have figured out has to move along, so the next fellow can carry it past where you left off. It may be the only generosity that outlives the man who does it.
This is no museum, and it is no catalog for specialists. It is a collection that explains itself. I built it to stir up the same curiosity that got hold of me in those quarries sixty years back, and to give it a place to start.