Excerpt from Tables for the Determination of Common Minerals: Chiefly by Their Physical Properties, With Confirmatory Chemical Tests 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 occasion to identify while the latter are very restricted in distribution, being often known from only a single locality, occurring for the most part in impure or very minute specimens, and being inadequately represented even in the largest and most complete collections. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.