Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2018
There are many basic copper chlorides and sulphates which occur as minerals but have received little recent crystallographic study. Yet copper is a widely distributed element and many of these minerals are the products of corrosion and weathering of bopper and copper ores.
In 1948 we were able to confirm the earlier goniometric work of G. F. Herbert Smith (1906) that paratacamite and atacamite are not identical species (Max H. Hey, 1950) and showed that the two minerals give different X-ray powder patterns. This result was further extended by Clifford Frondel (1950) to a single 'crystal and thermal study of paratacamite, in the course of which he measured the rhombohedral unit-cell dimensions and showed that this mineral can be artificially produced by various methods as well as by the action of salt-water on copper.