Sulfur, energy, and the environment

379 gene zone. It is clearly presented and contains much general information and many general concepts. However, this information remains essentially qualitative; the quantitative data refer only to general equations or average abundances and are not presented as rigourous statistical results. Furthermore, the information is not particularly new and one can regret that the translation came too late. Nevertheless, the

Geochemistry of Elements in the Supergene Zone can be used with great interest as a synthetic overview on the geochemistry, with a peculair attention to the Russian works and following the tradition of Vernadskii, Fersman, Polynov and Vinogradov.

book contains a series of chapters (11 through 14) dealing with agricultural and industrial uses of sulfur. Of particular value and interest to this reviewer is the extensive bibliography of ca. 1600 references which provides a convenient access to the technical literature on the subject matter. The handsome volume contains a number of helpful diagrams and a considerable amount of useful information in concise tabulated form. Altogether, this is a most impressive and authoritative volume. The author is to be congratulated on writing a book which will prove to be an asset to those in industry, government and academia who have an interest in sulfur. T.K. Wjewiorowski, Belle Chasse, La.

Yves Tardy, Toulouse

SULFUR, ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT B. Meyer, 1977, Sulfur, Energy, and the Environment. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 448 pp., Dfl, 97.00, U.S. $ 39.60. This book deals with the role of sulfur in industry and agriculture at a time when concerns relating to energy and the environment have a pronounced effect on technological trends. The emphasis, of course, is on sulfur. Matters concerning energy and the environment provide a suitable perspective and framework for the book. The author achieved an excellent balance between the breadth of scope and depth of treatment. The book includes chapters on the history of sulfur chemistry and on chemical properties of the elements. The chapter on the analytical chemistry of sulfur provides information on sulfur determination in soil, water, and air, with special reference to standard methods for sulfur in air, including those approved by the EPA. The chapter on occurrences and sources of sulfur is brief, but very informative. Those interested in the environmental aspects of sulfur will find worth reviewing Chapters 6, 8, 9 and 15, titled 'The Sulfur Cycles', 'Recovery from Combustion Gases', 'Environmental Control and Legislation', and 'Future Trends', respectively. Finally, the

MINERALOGY OF THE DIAMOND Yu.L. Orlov, 1978. The Mineralogy of the Diamond. John Wiley, New York, 231 pp., U.S. $ 32.00, $ 17.00. This book, a translation of the Russian monograph published in 1973, is 231 pages long and consists of ten chapters of rather uneven length. As with the old monographs by people such as Sutton and Goldschmidt the book is strongly biased towards the morphology of diamond crystals and the physical properties of diamonds. The book escapes from this rather narrow field by including chapters on the occurrence of diamonds in nature and the genesis of diamonds in terrestrial rocks, The first chapter deals with the varieties of diamond crystals, of which the Russian workers have described ten different varieties based upon form, opacity and inclusion content. This chapter might well have been merged with the following one on the structure of diamond in which the relatively new hexagonal polymorph of diamond (i.e. Ionsdaleite) is discussed together with the usual types. The chapter on the chemical composition of diamond is useful in that it discusses and tabulates the earlier work on minor elements that have been found in diamond. The work of Sellschop and his coworkers in Johannesburg has been