About

What it is

One entry per specimen. Each one is a photograph of the thing, a photograph of its powder on the plate, the numbers that came out of both, and a few hundred words about where it was picked up and what was awkward about it. There is no chronology to it and it is not a diary.

The order is the only editorial act on the site. Entries are sorted by the hue angle of their own powder, which puts specimens beside each other that look nothing alike, and puts a lot of distance between ones that do. If you want the ordinary arrangement it is here, kept as a control.

What it will not do

It will not identify anything for you. A streak narrows a list; it does not close it, and half the minerals worth arguing about streak white. Nothing here is a valuation, and nothing is for sale — see terms.

It also will not tell you exactly where anything was found. Grid references bring people with crowbars, and two of the seven workings are already unsafe. The localities are named and left at that.

The colour of this page

A register that argues about colour ought to be careful about its own. Laid out as angles on the colour circle, the streaks in this register leave one long stretch empty — 272° to 23.8°, 111.8° of nothing. Powders go red, brown, yellow, green, occasionally blue, and then stop.

So the site is printed at 328.1°, which is 0.2° off the middle of that stretch, and there are exactly four colours in the interface — #5e335c, #f3eef2, #c9b8c5 and #946f8a. Every other colour you can see was measured off a photograph on this site. There is no brand colour, because a brand colour on this page would look like a specimen.

Corrections

Two of the identifications here are the keeper's and not a laboratory's, and the entries say which. If you know better, say so — the entry will be changed and the change said out loud rather than quietly edited.