Mineralogy is among the oldest sciences and a core discipline of geology. Already in the Neolithic period, the recognition and use of various minerals was important knowledge for humans. Writers of the Antiquity on the subject, Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder, treated rocks and minerals from a natural-philosophical point of view. Polymaths like Avicenna (Persia) and Shen Kuo (China) in the 11th century AD also documented the minerals known to exist then. European authors of the Renaissance, with Georgius Agricola as the foremost, used the intrinsic physical properties of minerals to describe and classify them in systematic way, an approach that essentially established mineralogy as a science. In Sweden, there was little development in the field before the 18th century (a notable exception is the contributions of Urban Hjärne). During the Age of Liberty*, works relating to various aspects of minerals, by natural scientists like Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, Henrik Teofil Scheffer, Carl Linnaeus and Torbern Bergman, came to have a wide influence, far beyond Sweden’s borders. Among the mineralogists active in this dynamic period, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt stands out as an exeptionally innovative and forsighted character.