Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Tables for the Determination of Common Minerals: Chiefly by Their Physical Properties, With Confirmatory Chemical Tests
Although the published tables for the determination of minerals are very numerous; yet an experience Of five years in the Mineralogical Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the Teachers' School of Science of the Boston Society of Natural History, has convinced me that several important features are wanting in the best tables, for the use of beginners and general students, with which I am acquainted. The primary objects of any system of de terminative mineralogy should be: (r) to enable the student to identify certainly and easily such minerals as he is likely to meet; and (z) to cultivate his powers of observation and discrimination, and increase his familiarity with the various species and natural groups of minerals. The first of these primary Objects has been, rightly enough, the chief aim Of previous tables; but it is to be hoped that, as regards its di rect educational value, determinative mineralogy will not always be, as it is now, far behind determinative or analytical botany.
The principal defects of the best tables now in use, so far, at least, as the general student is concerned, are that they have too wide a scope, embracing all or a very large proportion of the known species of minerals, and that the determinations depend almost entirely upon the chemical behavior of the species.
It is scarcely possible to overstate the enormous disparity, as regards their abundance, between the two or three hundred common minerals and the one thousand or more rare species. The former are found abundantly in many localities, and in all good collections, and are, generally speaking, the only species the student will meet or have oc casion to identify; while the latter are very restricted in distribution, being Often known from only a single locality, occurn for the most part in impure or very minute specimens, and being inadequately rep resented even in the largest and most complete collections.
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