ABSTRACT
The guiding principles for specimen preparation techniques are reproducibility, accuracy, simplicity, low cost, and rapidity of preparation. Often these are mutually exclusive goals, and it becomes the job of the analyst to choose from the wide variety of available methods or to design a new method to fit a particular problem. Generally, it is not simply a matter of deciding which of the many procedures will work, but also involves consideration of the precision, accuracy, and time and cost factors involved.
