The decision of Springer-Verlag to publish this book in English came as a pleasant surprise. The fact is that I started writing the first version of the book back in 1978. I wished to attract attention to potentialities inherent in selected-area electron diffraction (SAED) which, for various reasons, were not being put to use. By that time, I had at my disposal certain structural data on natural and synthetic minerals obtained using SAED and high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM), and this stimulated my writing this book. There were several aspects concerning these data that I wished to...