which fell in Reed City, Osceola, Co., Mich. 351 Plate 73.—A stone meteor, about natural size, which fell in 1875 in Iowa Co., Iowa 352 FIELD BOOK OF COMMON ROCKS AND MINERALS CHAPTER I AN INTRODUCTION Why Why should one be interested in rocks and minerals? Because the whole world is made of rocks and minerals. They are the foundations on which we build. From them we draw all our metals, and the extent to which we utilize our minerals is a measure of the advance of our civilization. Fragments of rock are the soil from which, by way of the plants, we draw our food, and ultimately our life. The rocks make wild or gentle scenery, one at least of the sources of pleasure. Knowledge of rocks and minerals is then knowledge of fundamentals, of ultimate sources. Between finding the raw materials and their present uses there are usually many steps (so many that we forget that the beginning and end are united), as for instance in your watch. It is made of gold, brass, steel, agate, glass, and perhaps has luminous radium paint on the hands. It is a long way from finding and mining gold, chalcopyrite, hematite, carnotite, etc., through the raw materials, gold, copper, iron, etc., to the finished watch, but the minerals are the foundations of the watch; and it took centuries to find them and learn one by one how to use them, from the gold 10,000 years ago down to the radium within the last fifty years. Then too there is joy in going out into Nature’s wild and raw places, joy in being on the foundations of the earth, joy in the scenery, in the beauty of the minerals themselves.