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Mineral collecting by amateur "rockhounds" has never been more popular. Old quarries, road cuts, and exposed landscapes are being examined by new generations of minerals enthusiasts. Each needs a comprehensive guidebook with clear photographs and accurate data. This is it.
The Minerals Encyclopedia is unusual for the number of minerals it covers: more than 700 in 448 pages, with a useful glossary, an introduction to mineral collecting, printed front and back flaps that offer quick reference in the field, and a measuring rule on the back cover.
Usage: Cabochons as ring stones and for brooches, pendants, spheres for stone necklaces, also often as handicraft items.
Treatment: Non-beautiful blue lapis lazuli is frequently colored by placing it in dye solutions. However, this can be easily identified by rubbing with alcohol or acetone; dyed stones color the cotton pad blue.
Differentiation: The essentially always present inclusions of pyrite and calcite are highly characteristic. They are always absent in other dyed stones.
Morphology: Prismatic to tabular crystals, often cruciform twins (right-angled or intergrown at about 60°), always anhedral.
Origin and occurrence: Anhedral in mica schists and gneisses.
Accessory minerals: Quartz, mica, kyanite.
Similar minerals: Tourmaline always clearly exhibits trigonal sym-metry and does not form cruciform twins; kyanite is never dark brown; garnet has a distinct cubic crystal form; unlike staurolite, andalusite has an almost square cross-section.
Morphology: Prismatic crystals with characteristic trigonal end faces, radial aggregates, uneven.
Origin and occurrence: In hydrothermal deposits, in subvolcanic tin-silver deposits.
Accessory minerals: Jordanite, cerussite, pyrite, enargite, tinstone, argentite.
Similar minerals: Its characteristic crystal formmakes gratonite unmistakable; tourmaline does not have a metallic luster; pris-matic tinstone is tetragonal.
Use: Cabochons as ring stones and for brooches, pendants, spheres for stone necklaces, also often as handicraft items.
Differentiation: The practically always present intergrowths with malachite (green) make the stone very typical and unmistakable in appearance.
Differentiation: Due to its color and typical black veining, it is impossible to confuse rhodonite with any other gemstone or semi-precious stone.
Use: As ring stones, for pendants. Due to chiastolite’s distinct cru-ciform shape and its occurrence near the pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, chiastolite pendants were often worn as religious amulets.