Crossword-Solution: AUGITE 6 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 7

When we come to study the chemical composition and the microscopical structure of lavas, however, we shall find that there are many respects in which they differ entirely from these artificial products, they consisting chiefly of felspar, or of this substance in association with augite or hornblende.

These rocks possess an extremely varying character; they consist of black, brown, and grey, compact, basaltic bases, with numerous crystals of augite, hornblende, olivine, mica, and sometimes glassy feldspar.

Mica, it is known, seldom occurs where augite abounds; nor probably does the present case offer a real exception, for the mica (at least in my best characterised specimen, in which one nodule of this mineral is nearly half an inch in length) is as perfectly rounded as a pebble in a conglomerate, and evidently has not been crystallised in the base, in which it is now enclosed, but has proceeded from the fusion of some pre-existing rock.

These strata differ from the streams of basaltic lava forming the coast-plains, only in being more compact, and in the crystals of augite, and in the grains of olivine being of much greater size;—characters which, together with the appearance of the associated calcareous beds, induce me to believe that they are of submarine formation.

From these characters, I naturally thought that it was one of the pale species, decomposed, of the genus augite;—a conclusion supported by the unaltered rock being full of large separate crystals of black augite, and of balls and irregular streaks of dark grey augitic rock.