Seeing the minerals in the museum incited me to get little bags of “mixed minerals” from a local shop for a few pennies; these would contain little pieces of pyrites, galena, fluorite, cuprite, hematite, gypsum, siderite, malachite, and different forms of quartz, to which Uncle Dave might contribute rarer things, like tiny fragments of scheelite which had broken off his larger piece. Most of my mineral specimens were rather battered, often tiny ones that a real collector would sniff at, but they gave me a feeling of having a sample of nature for myself.
