A re-examination of churchite
In the course of a study of certain cerium minerals, a spectrogram of churchite was taken and it was noticed that the cerium lines were barely visible, whereas the yttrium lines were very strong. We therefore decided to re-investigate this species.Churchite was originally described by A. H. Church in 1865, and named by C. G. Williams in the same year. The specimens were collected by R. Talling from an unnamed locality in Cornwall. It has only been analysed once, by Church, who showed it to be a hydrated phosphate of rare-earths and lime; his quantitative data have been recalculated and included in table I. Church obtained qualitative reactions for the cerium group of rare-earths, and for cerium itself, but made no attempt to determine the ratio of cerium to yttrium earths; he assumed a mean molecular weight for the rare-earths which would correspond to R2O3 324, essentially a mixture of cerium earths with but little yttria, but did not adduce any evidence for this assumption.