The Journal des mines de la République was founded in An III and placed under the authority of the Agence des Mines. According to the statement printed at the beginning of the first volume, the journal was intended to “spread the knowledge necessary to ensure the success of mining exploitations.” This ambitious program involved the combination of different fields of knowledge, such as mineralogy, chemistry and mechanics, including the know-how related to mining. In addition, it implied a response to the project supported by the Comité de Salut Public to carry out an inventory of mineral resources of the French territory. Drawing on the analysis of the fifty-four first issues of this journal published in nine volumes between An III and An VII, this article examines how the survey methods, the descriptive enunciations and the models of intelligibility deployed within the Journal des mines envisioned the specific relationship between mineralogy and territorial statistics.