The Mineral Collection of the Chamber of Commerce and Trades in 1866 comprised about 200 objects. Thanks to the concern of Antun Drobac (1810-1882) the number of items in the collection rose rapidly over the years. Dubrovnik men who were employed in the Institute of Geology in Cairo, the Russian Mining Institute, Antonio Bey Figari, director of the Cairo Museum and Antun Catullo gave Drobac new mineral specimens. Drobac’s private collections together with the collections of the Chamber were the basis for the founding of the Patriotic Museum. When the Museum was opened in 1873, more than 5000 minerals were exhibited on wooden specimen trays. From 1931 to 1979 because of the constant moves of the Museum and the Collection, the number of objects declined, and today there are only 585 specimens in 444 inventory numbers.
Since 2015 the documentation of the collection has been run in a computer database. In 2016 the Collection of Minerals and Rocks was entered into the Register of Cultural Properties of the Republic of Croatia, as number 6590.
