Early writing on mineralogy, especially on gemstones, comes from ancient Babylonia, the ancient Greco-Roman world, ancient and medieval China, and Sanskrit texts from See more

The crystal structure is the arrangement of atoms in a crystal. It is represented by a lattice of points which repeats a basic pattern, called a unit cell, in three dimensions. The lattice can be characterized by its symmetries and by the dimensions of the … See more

In addition to macroscopic properties such as colour or lustre, minerals have properties that require a polarizing microscope to observe.
Transmitted light See more

Systematic mineralogy is the identification and classification of minerals by their properties. Historically, mineralogy was heavily concerned with taxonomy of the rock-forming … See more

An initial step in identifying a mineral is to examine its physical properties, many of which can be measured on a hand sample. These can be classified into density (often given as See more

A few minerals are chemical elements, including sulfur, copper, silver, and gold, but the vast majority are compounds. The classical method for identifying composition is wet chemical analysis, which involves dissolving a mineral in an acid such as See more

The environments of mineral formation and growth are highly varied, ranging from slow crystallization at the high temperatures and pressures of igneous melts deep … See more