Toward a definition of a mineral sample in geology

Summary Any rock may be regarded as an aggregate of mineral species frequency distributions, thus opening up a new method of analyzing the problems of the nature of these discrete distributions.Based on theorems in mathematical probability, a subrock sample is defined as a probability sample under the conditions that every mineral species' distribution function in this subrock converges probabilistically to one and the same distributions the nature of which is immaterial at this point.For obvious reasons, the situation is excluded if the sample size approaches infinity, i.e., Chebyshev's theorem (Chebyshev, 1867).