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Having spent a good part of the last three years behind a microscope as part of my BSc geology course in an historic London mining school, I can well appreciate the value of a book such as this. The clear photographs and illustrations and simple, to-the-point annotations are exactly what the average student needs. We all struggle to immediately recall to mind the diagnostic properties of even the simplest minerals, until years of familiarity have passed. Those, and the vast range of descriptive words for processes, textures and habits, all governed by conventions and acronyms (in petrology in general, eutectic/eutaxitic always got me stuck for some unknown reason) are painstakingly reiterated and clarified. Although I dumped petrology in favour of remote sensing for my final year, I look back on this book, and others like it, as the life-belt that may just have kept the early years of my degree from drowning.
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