Abstract
SIR THOMAS HOLLAND, principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, propounded some very pertinent questions in proposing the toast of the profession of chemistry at the Ramsay Chemical Dinner held in Glasgow on December 6. Sir Thomas said that some of the problems which have been baffling geologists for a long time are really problems for the chemist. In the early days, geologists were content with a knowledge of the principal constituents of minerals, and based their classifications on these. But it has become evident that, in some cases, it is the smaller constituents of a mineral which are the most important. With civilisation has grown the desire for the use of metals, and this desire has increased and will continue to increase until the supply of metals has been exhausted. What the geologist is most interested in and what he wants the help of the chemist to solve are, therefore, the laws which control natural deposits. These reactions of Nature have gone on for countless ages of time, and have produced local concentrations of minerals. We produce annually about 50,000 tons of nickel and 1,500,000 tons of copper, and yet the crust of the earth contains about twice as much nickel as copper. Our production of lead is about the same as that of copper, and the available supplies of lead are only one fifth of those of copper and therefore one tenth of those of nickel. Zinc, of which we produce more than 100,000 tons a year, is only half as abundant as copper, and we use three times as much tin as nickel, though the supplies of nickel are 50-100 times those of tin. There is surely something wrong in this relationship. The different habits of rocks in showing that varying tendency towards rearrangement of their constituents open up problems in physical chemistry which are still largely obscure.
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Minerals and their Utilisation. Nature 136, 945 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136945c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136945c0