Manual of Mineralogy (After James D. Dana)

If your trying to become a geologist, this is the book you need for reference, or you can spend 5 hours in the library looking for answers. Remember to keep your eye on it also, because other students are going to want MoM for themselves.

Dana's Manual of Mineralogy is a classic in the field of mineralogy. Althought it deals many oldtime methods in chemical geology it still provides a valuable insight to classical Mineral localities and to a classical crystallography providig many crystal morphology pictures of mineral specimens in discussion.

Dana's Manual of Mineralogy is one of the most important manuals ever written on mineralogy. It has been re-edit by Cornelius Klein after the death of the author.

I have used this book for my mineralogy class in college. I keep it as a reference. i believe my understanding of the physical properties of mineral could not have happened from lectures alone. It was this book which helped me and everyone in mineralogy classes throughout the U.S. There are easy to use tables and facts on almost every mineral you could come across in the field. I hope this book lasts with me the rest of my life.

This text is often used in college mineralogy courses. As one having considerable experience with minerals before taking the college course, I found the 21st edition a distinct improvement over the two previous editions. The strengths of this edition are in its treatment of crystallography and of crystal chemistry (however, Bloss' Crystallography and Crystal Chemistry covers this well), mineral chemistry (compositional variation in minerals, calculation of analyses, etc.), x-ray crystallography, mineral stability diagrams, good line crystal diagrams in its systematic section, and a usefully organized index. Although this reviewer has often disliked determinative tables as a waste of space (checking entries takes time but is educational), those in this edition have been found useful to students. A few weaknesses are the removal of interfacial angles from this edition (even cleavage angles may aid in identification), the absence (except for hydrochloric acid upon a few carbonates) of most simple chemical tests upon samples, using cheap hardware store acids and reagents, and the absence of any passing reference to the subject of blowpipe analysis, a historical adjunct that served mineralogy as much as the Bunsen burner served chemistry. Although that is a separate subject not possibly treated adequately within a one-semester course, and not generally treated in college courses today, it is a historic part of our mineralogical heritage, and often can serve a useful purpose in the aid of identification of commoner species. A few notes as to its place in history, and a few text references for further study, would have been appreciated. However, the Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, by Frederick H. Pough (Peterson field guide series) may serve as a useful complement to this text. This could use rewording in a few places, as some sentence structure (indeed some formula structure) may be found ambiguous, an example being formulas on page 75 to find a and c, which are not clear as to whether parts of these, as in the last paragraph on said page, are in the numerator or in the denominator... Another example is the use of the stereographic net, which I had quite a time figuring out from the text, and when I did I rewrote directions and pinned them up on the bulletin board of the geology dept. Kudos, however, to whomever put the stereonet inside the back cover of the text with the suggestion to photocopy it for use. Also the list, two pages past the last numbered page, of locations of some key tables and illustrations. Clarity of language is important to a student desiring to learn more about some aspect of the subject. It is difficult to rate books upon a number system, as objective reasons and examples are more informative. The rating, which seems to be required, is an average based upon my own personal opinion: 6.7. [DMM]