The experimenter is confronted nearly every day with the examination of results from his or her own experiments as well as those of others. There is a need to know the methods by which the data were obtained and what confidence can be placed in the numerical results. Significant aspects of these matters involve the principles and methods of statistics, and the jective of this chapter is to describe the basic ideas of statistics that are relevant to errors of observations and numbers derived from these observations. 

Micas are among the most common minerals in the Earth crust: 4.5% by volume. They are widespread in most if not all metamorphic rocks (abundance: 11%), and common also in sediment and sedimentary and igneous rocks. Characteristically, micas form in the uppermost greenschist facies and remain stable to the lower crust, including anatectic rocks (the only exception: granulite facies racks). Moreover, some micas are stable in sediments and diagenetic rocks and crystallize in many types of lavas. In contrast, they are also present in association with minerals originating from the very deepest parts of the mantle—they are the most common minerals accompanying diamond in kimberlites.

Behold the power of the microcomputer before your very eyes! This book took less than a year to complete from the initial conversations between Dan Merriam and myself to final typeset copy. This would have been impossible when the first volume of this book was published. All of the papers in this volume, with one exception, arrived on floppy disk but in four different disk formats and many wordprocessing formats. These were all handled elegantly by our typesetter and converted into the appropriate Macintosh file format. Even some of the figures were placed in the book electronically. I see this as a great boon to the world of science because of the much shorter time between inception and dispersal of scientific knowledge. As a result of using microcomputers to typeset this book, the information contained in it is current and fresh. <...>

The objective of this book is to provide a synthesis of the methods used in microfacies studies of carbonate rocks and to show how the application of microfacies studies has contributed to new developments in carbonate geology. In contrast with other textbooks on carbonate sedimentology this book focuses on those compositional and textural constituents of carbonates that reflect the depositional and diagenetic history and determine the practical usefulness of carbonate rocks.