Abstract
Dr. ETTEL'S book on the physical chemistry of the silicates is a very modern work, and is a striking illustration of the enormous progress which has been made in experimental methods during the past thirty or forty years. A book on this subject written during the nineteenth century would have been concerned mainly with empirical formulæ, constructed to represent the bewildering analyses of the silicate minerals, together with drawings and data to represent the external form of the crystals, and their optical properties. These aspects of the problem can still be presented, and substantial advances have been made in our knowledge of subjects such as the distribution of the elements in the lithosphere; but already on p. 19 of Dr. Eitel's book we have reached a section on “The Determination of Crystal Structure by Röntgen-methods”, and a study of the still rather limited results obtained by these methods has displaced the mass of crystallographic data which still await a clear interpretation in this way.
Physikalische Chemie der Silikate.
Von Wilhelm Eitel. Pp. xi + 552. (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1929.) 80 gold marks.
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L., T. Chemistry. Nature 124, 535 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124535a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124535a0