MINERALS OF THE WORLD: SYSTEMATICS AND GEOLOGY..
Minerals of the World: systematics and geology By: PhD Dr. Paulo César Pereira das Neves (usppd@yahoo.com.br). ( This work is exclusively for scientific dissemination and has no commercial value .) _______________________________________________________ __________ One of the most enigmatic phrases I've ever heard, was in a Mineralogy class, uttered by the late Prof. Dr. Jorge Alberto Willwock - "minerals represent the flowers of the inanimate world". And, if we think about it, they are, because the colors, the shine, the shapes, honestly, take us back to the plant world, to Nature in its most beautiful splendor. They are irreproducible entities, one mineral is never the same as another. A mineralogical species is a natural solid formed by geological processes. These must be, therefore, the relevant factors in the determination of a mineral and in the proposition of new species, whether on Earth or in extra-terrestrial bodies, with well-defined chemical composition and c