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Praseodymium always occurs naturally together with the other rare-earth metals. It is the fourth most common rare-earth element, making up 9.1 parts per million of the Earth's crust, an abundance similar to that of boron. In 1841, Swedish chemist Carl Gustav Mosander extracted a rare-earth oxide residue he called didymium from a residue he called "lanthana", in turn separated from cerium salts. In 1885, the Austrian chemist Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach separated didymium into two elements that gave salts of different colours, which he named praseodymium and neodymium. The name praseodymium comes from the Greek prasinos (πράσινος), meaning "green", and didymos (δίδυμος), "twin". Praseodymium metal tarnishes slowly in air, forming a spalling oxide layer like iron rust; a centimetre-sized sample of praseodymium metal corrodes completely in about a year.[13] It burns readily at 150 °C to form praseodymium (III,IV) oxide, a nonstoichiometric compound approximating to Pr6O11 Leo Moser (son of Ludwig Moser, founder of the Moser Glassworks in what is now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, not to be confused with the mathematician of the same name) investigated the use of praseodymium in glass colouration in the late 1920s, yielding a yellow-green glass given the name "Prasemit". However, at that time far cheaper colourants could give a similar colour, so Prasemit was not popular, few pieces were made, and examples are now extremely rare. Moser also blended praseodymium with neodymium to produce "Heliolite" glass ("Heliolit" in German), which was more widely accepted. The first enduring commercial use of purified praseodymium, which continues today, is in the form of a yellow-orange "Praseodymium Yellow" stain for ceramics, which is a solid solution in the zircon lattice. This stain has no hint of green in it; by contrast, at sufficiently high loadings, praseodymium glass is distinctly green rather than pure yellow.
