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Wanda & Gail wrote: >=20 > Bentonite clay is volcanic ash! >=20 > Get your dictionaries out before you put this dangerous material in > your mouth! I am an amateur geologist and I fossil hunt in deposits of >=20 > Gail Vass, RN A COMBINED REPLY ON BENTONITE AND A COMMENT ON CENSORSHIP Hi everyone who was interested in bentonite. Joao, thanks for your regards. If you look at my surname closely, HARVARD has an extra =93r=94. I like to think the American immigration officer misspelt =93our=94 family name. In the UK Havard is found in Wale= s (Pembroke) and arrived with the Norman conquest (dammit I=92m French - hard for an Englishman to take). Milton, (chemist / nuclear engineer) are you a PD sufferer? One of my worries is loss of mental faculty - to a large extent I live to work. I love geology, computers, mental challenges etc. Any comments?=20 Michel, thanks for the info re ion chromotography. I didn=92t know that 25 years ago either! Are you a scientist? Any comment on what I put to Milton? Wanda and Gail, don=92t panic (well not yet). There is some differences between ingestion of a material and inhalation. As far as I am aware bentonite is not toxic in anyway and has been used for years as facial and body mudpacks. Death from volcanic ejecta is normaly by: -physical contact eg a big boulder hitting you on the head -suffocation eg buried (Pompei etc) -burning - it is often very very hot - associated poisinous gas eg H2S I would not eat bentonite straight from digging it up, but the refined clay mineral should be OK. As a very common material for drilling oil wells there are no special procedures for handling it, but as you very correctly point out a face mask is advisable if you are working in a dusty environment. Another clay mineral which used to be commonly ingested (with morphine for upset stomach) is Kaolinite. This is effectively a more complete weathering product down the line from Bentonite. Conclusion: if you want to eat bentonite, don't worry, be happy, I think if it were toxic there would have been some class action suites somewhere by now.=20 PS if you want to worry, flour (the cooking, baking variety) can be violently explosive when dispersed in the atmosphere in a critical concentration - people beware in the kitchen. Censorship: Although the above is probably only 5 % directly relevent to PD, the couple of replies I received from my original mail on bentonite meant a lot to me. Maybe something here will strike a chord with someone else. I hope that tolerance will prevail. If people are so focused that they do not wish to look at anything else in the PD community other than drugs etc. there are ways to set up the mail folders (at least in Netscape) by author, thread, subject, date etc, and a simple point and shoot with the mouse whilst depressing the =93shift=94 key will highlight a block of mails that can be deleted with = one push of the button.. I hope that Milton can make some comments on his experience (if any) that could help me and others - to me that=92s a very important function of this list. Let=92s not put moral or any other pressure on anyone to refrain from comment in this list. best regards PS Wanda and Gail, if you want to talk geology anytime I'd love to (but not in this forum, that would be pushing it)