Field Notes · Drawer No. 14
Why a galena cube tells you more than any label
Three weeks reordering a drawer of lead-gray sulphides taught me that the specimen, not the handwriting beneath it, is the honest record.
The galena came up from the Coeur d'Alene lots last winter, and I spent two weeks doing nothing but turning each piece against the lamp. Lead-gray, cubic, the cleavage opening in three flat planes you could set a straightedge against — and where the felt held it, a single bright corner caught the bulb like a struck match.
The label lies before the mineral does
I had inherited the drawer with its locality cards already typed, and half of them were wrong. A "Joplin, Mo." pyrite was plainly the brass-yellow of a Spanish lot; the resinous grey sphalerite filed under galena fooled nobody who weighed it in the hand. So I stopped trusting the typewriter and started trusting the streak plate.
A specimen mislabeled is still a specimen. A label without its specimen is only a rumor on pasteboard.
By March the drawer read clean: each cube seated in its compartment, luster up, the dull brass beside the lead-gray, every card rewritten by hand to match what the glass-topped tray actually held.