A Handbook of Minerals, Crystals, Rocks and Ores

The book is divided into four sections, minerals, crystals, rocks and ores. Section A incorporates nine chapters, begins with presenting salient features of the earth--its structure and composition. The second Minerals and Mineralogy briefly tells about their diversity and their categorisation and introduces the interesting way they are named. Crystal chemistry the third is the heart and soul of mineralogy and deals in somewhat details about the building blocks of minerals -atoms and ions and the way they form diverse types of minerals are. It tries to tell why every combination of chemical compounds cannot result into a naturally occurring mineral.

The fourth and fifth chapters deal with Properties of Minerals, physical and optical. The section describe various physical properties that are helpful in the identification both in hand specimens and as thin section under the microscope. These two chapters are adequately aided with a number of illustrations, photographs and photomicrographs to bring home the point. Chapter five deals with classification of minerals and their occurrence and forms a prelude to the next two chapters on descriptive mineralogy. Important silicate and non silicate minerals are described in chapters eight and nine.

A brief description of mineral uses is dealt with in both descriptive mineralogy as well Section D on mineral deposits, however, the last chapter, Mineral uses presents an overall picture and will be interesting as well as educating to students and even general reader.

Section B is devoted to crystals and crystallography. Chapter one introduces the subject while two presents basic crystallographic elements. Chapter three deals with the main six crystals systems while also giving a preliminary idea about stereographic projection and x-ray crystallography.

Section C covers petrology, beginning with introduction to science of petrology, rock nomenclature. two is devoted to the study of igneous rocks, including their forms, composition, textures, structures, classification and description. Sedimentary rocks is the theme of three while different aspects of metamorphic rocks including kinds and agents of metamorphism and classification and description of metamorphism. The last portion of this also considers metamorphism in the background of global tectonics. five, the rock cycle presents a concise summary of geological events that have shaped the planet earth. The last section D is what geology is all...