In 1978 Pierre Devismes wrote a book Atlas photographique des mineraux d’alluvions (Photographic atlas of detrital minerals). I believe it remains the best illustrated treatise on detrital minerals to this day. Unfortunately I do not own a copy of it. It is out of print and seems to be impossible to purchase. But I do have selected pages of it in scanned format.
There are 641 photographs depicting 183 alluvial minerals. This is really impressive number because I believe you can easily describe 99.99999 percent of the sand grains with 183 mineral species (if we leave out lithic fragments and biogenic grains).
But this is nothing unimaginable. What really strikes me is the number of sand samples/mineral concentrates his work group at BRGM mining division in Nantes described and analysed — 286,088 (most of them from France and collected during 8 years of field works). This number is beyond what I can imagine. I have more than 1,000 sand samples and even this is far more than I can handle. I have superficially looked (with microscope) upon all of them but I have more deeply studied maybe only one hundred or so.
The mineral concentrates shown on the photos of the book are selected from these samples. I don’t know how they identified all the mineral species but it definitely is lots and lots of work that takes enormous time. I wonder if someone now wants to underake writing such a book. How much would it cost? Well, I don’t want to think about that and it may well explain why there are no such books written in the last 30 years.
If such a huge number of samples is studied and a book written based on that, then it is no wonder that the book is out of print and no one considers selling it although it is quite ancient already.
Such a large number of sand samples seems to be a perfect database for some serious statistical conclusions. I am not sure about how much of it this book contains but I have a copy of a table from the book (repeated in another book) where mineral species have been categorized according to their frequency of occurrence in sand.
I hope I won’t commit a serious crime if I repeat part of it (the most common ones) here.
Quartz — essential component
Feldspar — essential component
Mica — very abundant
Tourmaline — very frequent
Staurolite — very frequent
Garnet — very frequent
Zircon — very frequent
Glauconite — very frequent
Magnetite — very frequent
Hematite — very frequent
Ilmenite — very frequent
Rutile — very frequent
Cassiterite — very frequent
Pyroxene — frequent
Sillimanite — frequent
Limonite — frequent
Leucoxene — frequent
Pyrite — frequent
Marcasite — frequent
Anatase — frequent
Monazite — frequent
Siderite — frequent
Amphibole — frequent enough
Epidote — frequent enough
Titanite — frequent enough
Andalusite — frequent enough
Kyanite — frequent enough
Goethite — frequent enough
Spinel — frequent enough
Chromite — frequent enough
Corundum — frequent enough
Apatite — frequent enough
Wolframite — frequent enough
Arsenopyrite — frequent enough
Topaz — frequent enough
Olivine — frequent enough
Perovskite — frequent enough
Xenotime — frequent enough
Columbite-tantalite — frequent enough
Galena — frequent enough
Sphalerite — frequent enough
Cinnabar — frequent enough
Scheelite — frequent enough
Barite — frequent enough
Beryl — frequent enough
According to Devismes, all other minerals are either rare or very rare in sand.