Hi All,

Thank you to everyone who contributed to my search for locating all the cotterite specimens that might exist. I really appreciated your help.

But I had a childishly thrilling experience myself on this project only two days ago. I got permission from Prof Steven Daly of University College Dublin's School of Geological Sciences to look through the school's mineral collections. The majority of these are stored in a large metal shipping container close to the school, which everyone is aware is not ideal, but with money being so tight nowadays there is no alternative. However, only some of this collection has been even roughly catalogued; large chunks remain completely unknown to UCD staff and, indeed, everyone. But I had a feeling that somewhere in there might be an undiscovered cotterite. And - after 4 cold hours sifting through dust, rust, cobwebs, damp, pyrite disease and getting covered in the lot - I found what I had been looking for. A single, small group of cotterite crystals, with absolutely no identification or labels on it whatsoever [and no sign that there ever had been a label on it], in the middle of an anonymous old wooden drawer with other forgotten, unlabelled and unloved crystals. Fantastic!

Not only that, but I also found - that again, no-one living knew about - about 5 (at least) historic old specimens of killinite that were still labelled as such. Killinite was quite a famous mineral in the 19thC as a new mineral that had been found in the granite (granite pegmatites) at Killiney, south County Dublin. It made numerous appearances in many mineral books, geology texts, field guides, etc, and not just for Ireland. Unfortunately, it was later discovered to be just an altered version of spodumene and subsequently discredited. But originally labelled specimens of 'killinite' are hard to come by and UCD, now to their surprise, has one of the major collections in Ireland.

I also found a group of chalybite crystals that, according to it's label [and happily this specimen had a good label], had been donated to the Royal College of Science (Dublin) by none other that William G. Lettsom himself (of Greg and Lettsom Manual of the mineralogy of Great Britain and Ireland fame].

Many questions, potential historical investigations and a proper cataloguing project are raised by all this, but that might be some time off. Just no money for it.

But what a great 4 hours uncovering completely lost/forgotten mineral treasures. It has given this middle-aged geologist a renewed spark.

Patrick