Mastering the Art of Silicate Mineralogy

The Chemistry of Earth’s Crust Even by the extravagant standards of the nineteenth century, Frank Wigglesworth Clarke (1847–1931) (fig. 1) exhibited a startling passion for the tabulation of scientific measurements. He served for more than four decades as chief chemist with the U.S. Geological Survey, simultaneously acting as honorary curator of minerals for the Smithsonian (Schaller 1931; Dennis 1932). His legacy of more than three hundred papers includes five editions of his signature work, The Data of Geochemistry, an exhaustive anthology of the compositions of lake, river, spring, and ocean waters, volcanic gases, molten magmas, minerals, metallic ores, hydrocarbons, and igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks—exceeding 800 pages by the final version (Clarke 1924). His output also comprises The Constants of Nature (Clarke 1873), Weights, Measures, and Money of All Nations (Clarke 1877), A Recalculation of the Atomic Weights (Clarke 1910), and—perhaps not surprising for a person who seemed most at ease with numbers—How to Play Solitaire (Clarke 1870). Clarke was much honored in his lifetime, and today he is esteemed for a particularly daring calculation—the earliMastering the Art of