n. The act of building or constructing; a building up; edification.n. That which is built or constructed; an edifice or a building of any kind; in the widest sense, any production or piece of work artificially built up, or composed of parts joined together in some definite manner; any construction.n. An organic form; the combination of parts in any natural production; an organization of parts or elements.n. Mode of building, construction, or organization; arrangement of parts, elements, or constituents: form; make: used of both natural and artificial productions.n. Specifically— In biology, manner or mode of organization; construction and arrangement of tissues, parts, or organs as components of a whole organism; structural or organic morphology; organization: as, animal or vegetable structure; the structure of an animal or a plant; the structure of the brain, of a coral, etc.n. In geology, various characteristic features, considered collectively, of rocks and of rock-forming minerals, which features differ much in their nature and origin. Stratification, jointing, cleavage, and foliation are among the principal structural peculiarities of rock-masses, which are chiefly to be studied in the field. Some geologists would limit the term structure to petrographic phenomena of this kind, which have been designated as macroscopic rock-structures. The minuter structural details of rocks and their components are in part included under the name structure, and in part under that of texture. Thus, a rock may have a crystalline, granular, spherulitic, perlitic, etc., structure, or a flinty, earthy, glassy, etc., texture. But the usages of geologists differ in the employment of terms of this kind, and there can be no precise limit drawn separating textures from structures. In general, however, the structural peculiarities of a rock are those which specially interest the geologist; the textural belong more properly to the mineralogist. Microstructures, or those details of structure belonging to the constituents of rocks which are in general not to be satisfactorily studied without the aid of the microscope, are peculiarly the field of observation of the lithologist. For macrostructures, see breccia, cleat, cleavage, 3, concretionary, fragmentary, foliation, 6, joint, 2, schist, slate and slaty, and stratification; for microstructures and textures, see amygdaloidal, cryptocrystalline, crystalline, felsophyre, globulite, granitoid, granophyre and granophyric, holocrystalline, massive, 5, microcrystalline, microlith and microlithie, ocellar, pegmatitic, perlitic, porphyritic, scoriaceous, spherulitic, trachytic, vesicular, vitreous, and vitrophyre.To form into a structure; organize the parts or elements of in structural form.n. In chem., the order of attachment of the atoms which constitute the molecule of a substance. It is expressed by a structural or constitutional formula.n. in petrography, a structure produced in metamorphic rocks by the development of small lenses of granular texture in a micaceous laminated mass.
