Ekebergite (of Berzelius)

Named by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in honor of Anders Gustav Ekeberg, discoverer of tantalum.
Ekebergite has been used historically as a varietal name of scapolite and it goes back to an article by Ekeberg (1807) where he described a massive, sodium-containing mineral from the Hesselkulla iron mine in the Bergslagen region. This material was subsequently coined “ekebergite or Hesselkulla natrolite” by Berzelius in his chemical system and placed between wernerite and skapolite (Berzelius 1815, 108). From the 1820’s to 1850’s ekebergite or eckebergite (sic!) appears in systematic mineralogies as an illdefined variety or possible species within the scapolite group. Wolff (1843) concluded in a dissertation on scapolite related minerals that these should be divided into three groups/species. For the first group – comprising varieties with a mixed content of Ca and Na, such as “ekebergite” – Wolff suggested to retain the name skapolite, whereas the two other Ca-dominant groups of minerals, were called meionite and wernerite. This may be thought of as the official “discreditation” of the varietal name ekebergite. In 1868 J. D. Dana in his System of mineralogy (5th ed.) tried to revive several scapolite varietal names, including ekebergite, and gave them “species status” to highlight minor chemical variations within the scapolite group. This scapolite group reformation, comprising alltogether eight “species”, was neither taken up by contemporary mineralogists nor continued in the sixth edition of System of mineralogy edited by E. S. Dana (1892).
Hausmann (1813, 523) and later Fuchs (1818, 75) referred to this material as wernerite analysed by Ekeberg. Clark’s (1993, 198) reference to Fuchs (1818) under ‘Ekebergite’, is thus to the material as such and not to the name or the naming. Fuchs (1844, 196) does only refer to skapolith and mejonit.

A synonym of 'Wernerite'