Dana's New Mineralogy...


Errata
In November 1997 the 8th edition of Dana's classic 'System of Mineralogy' appeared under the title 'Dana's New Mineralogy'.

The mineralogical community had been waiting several decades to see the appearance of a book covering all known mineral species, including the silicates. It is clear that expectations ran high, especially when the date of publication was delayed for 6 months and when it became known that the planned 900 pages would increase to over 1800 pages (which also implied almost a doubling of the purchase price).

To bring all this information together in one single volume must have been a tremendous effort for the editors. The publisher also had to make a special effort as well as he had to make concessions like the use of rather fine paper to gather all pages in a single volume.

Unfortunately the main concession becomes clear after consulting the book. It turns out to contain a lot of, mainly typographical, errors especially in the orthography of mineral localities. Probably, from a certain moment onward, the authors have been working under pressure to complete the work. A pity for a book with such a rich tradition.

Errors or not, "Dana's New Mineralogy" remains a book with a wealth of information. Therefore the idea arose among the members of the 'Mineralogy Club of Antwerp, Belgium' to provide the users of this work with an errata list where everybody could add his comments. The errata list could finally be used by the editors of "Dana's New Mineralogy" to improve later editions of the book.



Excel file
A compressed (ZIP) excel-file (89 KB) containing all observed errors is here for download. Newly added errors (March, 2001) are indicated in blue, and those of the previous update (April, 2000) in red.



Contributors
Shortly after the appearance of "Dana's New Mineralogy" several members of the "Mineralogische Kring Antwerpen" brought to our attention that they disovered a number of errors in this book. Therefore it has been decided to ask several volunteers to carefully read some chapters of the book, and to report the errors observed.

The following persons volunteered: Hugo BENDER, Paul BENDER, Michel DELIENS, Henri DILLEN, Herwig PELCKMANS, Ludo VAECK, Frederik VAN LAER, Paul VAN HEE, Prof. Renaat VAN TASSEL, Prof. Renaud VOCHTEN, all from Belgium later, more errors were indicated by: Jeffrey DE FOURESTIER (CDN), Marc FAVRE (CDN), Ted HADLEY (USA), Lazlo HORVATH (CDN), Tim JOKELA Jr (CDN), Lance E. KEARNS (USA), William G. LYON (USA), Damaso MOREIRAS-BLANCO (ES), Paul POHWAT (USA), Bob RAMIK (CDN), Philippe SAGET (FR), Wilfried STEFFEN (DE), Paul TAMBUYSER (BE), Eric VERCAMMEN (BE), John S. WHITE (USA).
Version 4 (issued January 2001) contained nearly 200 more errors reported by Philippe Saget (France) and several more reported by others. Moreover, we received some nameless contributions. To those incognito mineralogists, many thanks as well !