This book is intended to be a complete and clear introduction to the field of crystallography for undergraduate and graduate students and lecturers in physics, chemistry, biology, materials and earth sciences, or engineering. It includes an extensive discussion of the 14 Bravais lattices and the reciprocal to them, basic concepts of point group symmetry, the crystal structure of elements and binary compounds, and much more. Besides that, the reader can find up-to-date values for the lattice constants of most elements and about 650 binary compounds (half of them containing rare earth metals). The entire notation in this book is consistent with the International Tables for Crystallography. <...>

The name bentonite was suggested in 1898 by Knight for a peculiar claylike material with soapy properties from its occurrence in the Fort Benton unit of Cretaceous age formations in Wyoming (U.S.A.). Hewitt (1917) and Wherry (1917) first established that this particular clay is an alteration product of volcanic ash, although an earlier observation by Condra (1908) suggested this origin for a similar clay from northern Nebraska. Ross and Shannon (1926) presented the following definition which has been widely quoted:

A number of functional materials based on rare earth oxides have been developed in various fields. Up to 1990, many review articles describing rare earth oxides have been reported and several intensive articles deal the properties e.g. preparation, structure and transformation and have been published early nineteen nineties. In these ten years, much progress has been made in the characterization of rare earth oxides from high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM), as well as in a unique preparation of ultra-fine particles and in the theoretical calculation.

The probing questions asked in biomineralization research are inevitably at the interface between two, three, or sometimes more disciplines. Observations are made at all length scales and involve bulk structures and interphases, macromolecules, cells and materials, and solid state transformations, and at the heart of this all, biomineralization is the product of complex cellular activity. It is therefore no surprise that the development of this field has closely tracked the development of analytical technology, literally over the last 300 years. Thus, a handbook devoted to methodology in the field of biomineralization is no doubt an invaluable resource. <...>