[Rockhounds] The Vaux collection at the Academy of Science in Phily

[Rock Currier]

The Academy is not going to sell the Vaux collection and has instead placed 
a staff paleontologist in charge of the collection. Is this something that 
we should be glad about? The gentleman is probably very well qualified for 
caring for fossils, and I am sure that somewhere in his early training he 
had a geology course where he learned how to distinguish calcite and gypsum 
from quartz & pyrite, but one wonders how many of the specimens in the Vaux 
collection he could identify without looking at their labels. So now what 
will become of the collection? A small token display of the minerals in a 
prominent place in the Academy till the heat dies down? And of the rest of 
the collection? Placed in a remote a location as they can manage? How many 
people saw the collection during the last 40 years? Probably less than 100. 
How many will see it during the next two generations? Certainly not very 
many. They just don't have the staff to hold peoples hands while they go 
through the drawers. Would it not be better to have sold the things to 
collectors where the specimens would be much more widely available and seen. 
At least the collectors would know what they are and how much they are 
worth. No one at the Academy does.

Rock