Testing an Earth-Science Aid

Making a collection is not always considered an erudite use of laboratory time. It has been said that study of rocks, for example, entails a good deal more than discovering that a specific specimen can be assigned a specific name. This is freely admitted to be true, but this writer has discovered that assigning the proper name to a specimen demands a more careful and memorable examination of discriminating details of rock types, for example, and that it leads to a useful familiarity with variations of a single rock type