THE EMERALD.
Dutens and several others who
have written upon gems and precious
stones during the last two centuries
have asserted that the ancients were
unacquainted with the true emerald, and
that Heliodorus, when speaking nearly
two thousand years ago of "gems green
as a meadow in the spring," or Pliny,
when describing stone of a "soft green
lustre," referred to the peridot, the plasma,
the malachite, or the far rarer gem,
the green sapphire. But the antiquary
has come to the rescue with the treasures
of the despoiled mounds of Tuscany, the
exposed ashes of Herculaneum and Pompeii,
and now exhibits emeralds which
were mounted in gold two thousand years
before Columbus dreamed of the New
World, or Pizarro and his remorseless
band gathered the precious stones by
the hundred-weight from the spoils of
Peru. Although these specimens of antique
jewelry set with emeralds may be
numbered by the score or more in the
museums and "reliquaries" of Europe,
but very few engraved emeralds have
descended to us from ancient times:
This rarity is not due to the hardness of
the stone, for the ancient lapidaries cut
the difficult and still harder sapphire:
therefore we must believe the statement
of the early gem-writers that the emerald
was exempted from the glyptic art by
common consent on account of its beauty
and costliness.
The emerald is now one of the rarest
of gems, and its scarcity gives rise to
the inquiry as to what has become of the
abundant shower of emeralds which fairly
rained upon Spain during the early
days of the conquest of Mexico and
Peru, bringing down the value of fine
stones to a trifling price. As with all
commercial articles, there is a waste and
loss to be accounted for during the wear
of three centuries, but this alone will not
explain their present rarity in civilized
countries. Even in the times of Charles
II., when the destitution of the country
was extreme, the dukes of Infantado and
Albuquerque had millions in diamonds,
rubies and precious stones, yet hardly
possessed a single sou. So impoverished
was the land, and so slender were the
purses of all, that the duke of
Albuquerque dined on an egg and a pigeon,
yet it required six weeks to make an inventory
of his plate. At this period,
when the nobles gave fêtes the lamps
were often decorated with emeralds and
the ceilings garlanded with precious
stones. The women fairly blazed with
sparkling gems of fabulous value, while
the country was starving. Most, if not
all, of this missing treasure was transferred
to Asia, and with the silver current
which flowed steadily from the
Spanish coffers into India went many of
the emeralds also; for in those regions
this gem is regarded as foreign stone,
and the natives, investing it with the
possession of certain talismanic properties,
prize it above all earthly treasures.
When the Spaniards commenced their
march toward the capital of Mexico, they
were astonished at the magnificence of
the costumes of the chiefs who came to
meet them as envoys or join them as
allies, and among the splendid gems
which adorned their persons they recognized
emeralds and turquoises of such
rare perfection and beauty that their
cupidity was excited to the highest degree.
During the after years of conquest
and occupation the avaricious spoilers
sought in vain for the parent ledge where
these precious stones were found. Recent
times have, however, revealed the
home of the Mexican turquoise, which
has proved to be in the northern part of
Mexico, as the Totonacs informed the
inquiring Spaniards. The first of these
mines, which is of great antiquity, is
situated in the Cerrillos Mountains,
eighteen miles from Santa Fé. The
deposit occurs in soft trachyte, and
an immense cavity of several hundred
feet in extent has been excavated by the
Indians while searching for this gem in
past times. Probably some of the fine
turquoises worn by the Aztec nobles at
the time of the Spanish Conquest came
from this mine. Another mine is located
in the Sierra Blanca Mountains in New
Mexico, but the Navajos will not allow
strangers to visit it. Stones of transcendent
beauty have been taken from
it, and handed down in the tribe from
generation to generation as heirlooms.
Nothing tempts the cupidity of the Indians
to dispose of these gems, and
gratitude alone causes them to part with
any of these treasures, which, like the
mountaineers of Thibet, they regard with
mystical reverence. The Navajos wear
them as ear-drops, by boring them and
attaching them to the ear by means of
a deer sinew. Lesser stones are pierced,
then strung on sinews and worn as neck-laces.
Even the nobler Ute Indians,
when stripping the ornaments of turquoise
from the ears of the conquered
Navajos, value them as sacred treasures,
and refuse to part with them even for
gold or silver.
All the Spanish accounts of the invasion
of Mexico agree in the great abundance
of emeralds, both in the adornment
of the chiefs and nobles and also in the
decoration of the gods, the thrones and
the paraphernalia. The Mexican historian
Ixtlilxochitl says the throne of gold
in the palace of Tezcuco was inlaid with
turquoises and other precious stones—that
a human skull in front of it was
crowned with an immense emerald of a
pyramidal form.
The great standard of the republic
of Tlascala was richly ornamented with
emeralds and silver-work. The fantastic
helmets of the chiefs glittered with gold
and precious stones, and their plumes
were set with emeralds. The mantle of
Montezuma was held together by a clasp
of the green chalchivitl (jade), and the
same precious gem, with emeralds of
uncommon size, ornamented other parts
of his dress.
The Mexicans carved the obdurate
jade and emerald with wonderful skill,
using, like the Peruvians, nothing but
silicious powder and copper instruments
alloyed with tin. They also worked with
exquisite taste in gold and silver, and
they represented Nature so faithfully and
so beautifully that the great naturalist
Hernandez took many of these objects
thus portrayed for his models when
describing the natural history of the
country.
When Cortés returned home he displayed
five emeralds of extraordinary
size and beauty, and presented them to
his bride, the niece of the duke de Bejar.
On his famous expedition along the Pacific
coast and up the Gulf of California
he was reduced to such want as to be
obliged to pawn these jewels for a time.
One of them was as precious as Shylock's
turquoise, and Gomara states that
some Genoese merchants who examined
it in Seville offered forty thousand golden
ducats for it. One of the emeralds was
in the form of a rose; the second in that
of a horn; the third like a fish with eyes
of gold; the fourth was like a little bell,
with a fine pearl for a tongue, and it
bore on its rim the following inscription
in Spanish: "Blessed is he who created
thee!" The fifth, which was the most
valuable of all, was in the form of a
small cup with a foot of gold, and with
four little chains of the same metal attached
to a large pearl as a button: the
edge of the cup was of gold, on which
was engraved in Latin words, "Inter
natos mulierum non surrexit major."
These splendid gems are now buried
deep in the sand on the coast of Barbary,
where they were lost in 1529, when
Cortés was shipwrecked with the admiral
of Castile whilst on their way to assist
Charles V. at the siege of Algiers.
The quantity of emeralds obtained by
the Spaniards in their pillage of Mexico
was large, but it was trifling when compared
with that collected by Pizarro and
his remorseless followers in the sack
of Peru. Many large and magnificent
stones were obtained by the Spaniards,
but the transcendent gem of all, called
by the Peruvians the Great Mother, and
nearly as large as an ostrich egg, was
concealed by the natives, and all the
efforts of Pizarro and his successors to
discover it proved unavailing.
The immense uncut Peruvian emerald
given by Rudolph II. to the elector of
Saxony is still preserved in the Green
Vaults at Dresden. This collection is
the finest in the world, and is of the
value of many millions of dollars. The
treasures are arranged in eight apartments,
each surpassing the previous one
in the splendor and richness of its contents.
This museum dates from the
early period when the Freyburg silver-mines
yielded vast revenues, and made
the Saxon princes among the richest
sovereigns in Europe. With lavish hand
these potentates purchased jewels and
works of art, and the treasures they have
thus accumulated are of immense value,
and remind the traveler of the gorgeous
descriptions of Oriental magnificence.
The finest emerald in Europe is said
to belong to the emperor of Russia. It
weighs but thirty carats, but it is of the
most perfect transparency and of the
most beautiful color. There are many
other fine emeralds among the imperial
jewels of the czar, some of which are
of great size and rare beauty. The
ancient crown of Vladimir glitters with
four great stones of unusual brilliancy.
The grand state sceptre is surmounted
by another emerald of great size. The
sceptre of Poland, which is now treasured
in the Kremlin, has a long green
stone, fractured in the middle. It is not
described, and may be one of the Siberian
tourmalines, some of which closely
approach the emerald in hue. The imperial
orb of Russia, which is of Byzantine
workmanship of the tenth century,
has fifty emeralds. This fact alone would
seem to prove that emeralds were known
in Europe or Asia Minor long before the
discovery of America; but, on the other
hand, the ancient crown which was taken
when Kasan was subjugated in 1553 is
destitute of emeralds. And hence we
are inclined to believe the imperial orb
to be of modern workmanship, especially
as some of the ancient state chairs do
not exhibit emeralds among their decorations
of gems and precious stones.
Nowhere in North America do the
true emeralds occur. Professor Cleaveland,
who was one of the best authorities
of his day, maintained nearly half
a century ago that emeralds which exhibited
a lively and beautiful green hue
were found in blasting a canal through
a ledge of graphic granite in the town
of Topsham in Maine. Several of the
crystals presented so pure, uniform and
rich a green that he ventured to pronounce
them precious emeralds. But
to-day we are unable to verify the assertion,
or point to a single specimen similar
in hue to the emerald from the
above-mentioned locality.
The nearest approach to the emerald
in color, with the exception of the incomparable
green tourmalines from
Maine, are the beryls of North and
South Royalston in the State of Massachusetts.
These beautiful stones exhibit
the physical, characteristics of emeralds
with the exception of the color, in which
they differ very perceptibly. But to appreciate
fully the difference in hue we
must compare the two gems. Then the
lively green of the beryl fades away before
the overpowering hue of the emerald,
whose rich prismatic green may be
taken as the purest type of that color
known to the chemist or the painter.
Two summers ago we visited the localities
in Massachusetts which were
famous in the days of Hitchcock and
Webster. We found that the beryls occurred
in a very coarse granite, where
the quartz appeared in masses and the
felspar in huge crystals. These also
occur in finer granite, and exhibit no
indications of veins or connection with
each other. They are few in number,
and are soon exhausted by blasting,
being generally very superficial. After
removing several tons of the rock at the
locality at North Royalston, where the
beryls appear on the summit of the loftiest
hill, our labors were at length rewarded
with two beautiful crystals. One
of them was a fine prism an inch in
diameter, of perfect transparency and
of a deep sea-green color, which, however
is far from being similar to the
transcendent hue of the Granada emeralds,
which exhibit an excess of neither
blue nor yellow. The other was yellowish-green,
resembling the chrysoberyls
of Brazil.
Other but imperfect crystals were
brought to light, some fragments of
which exhibited the deepest golden tints
of the topaz, and others the tints of the
sherry-wine colored topazes of Siberia.
Magnificent crystals have been found in
these localities in times long past, and
from the fragments and sections of crystals
found in the débris of early explorations
we observed the wide range of color
and the deep longitudinal striae which
characterize the renowned beryls from
the Altai Mountains, in Siberia. Lively
sea- and grass-green, light and deep yellow,
also blue crystals of various shades,
have been found here.
At the quarries on Rollestone Mountain
in Fitchburg beryls of a rich golden
color have been blasted out. Some of
these approach the chrysoberyl and topaz
in hardness and hue. Others so
closely resemble the yellow diamond
that they may readily be taken for that
superior gem. The refractive power of
these yellow stones is remarkable, and
the goniometer will probably reveal a
higher index than is accorded to all the
varieties of beryl by the learned Abbé
Haüy.
Beautiful transparent beryls have been
found among the granite hills of Oxford
county in Maine, and the late Governor
Lincoln nearly half a century ago
possessed a splendid crystal which would
have rivaled the superb prism found at
Mouzzinskaia, and which the Russians
value so highly. The extended and unexplored
ledges of granite which rise from
the shores of the ocean at Harpswell in
Maine, and stretch north-westward for
nearly a hundred miles, quite to the base
of the White Mountain group, are not
only rich in beryls, but they contain
many of the rarest minerals known to
the mineralogist. And perhaps there is
no other field of equal extent in the
country which offers to the mineralogist
such a harvest of the rare and curious
productions of the mineral kingdom.
At Haddam in Connecticut beautiful
crystals of beryl have been discovered,
and one of these, of fine green color, an
inch in diameter and several inches in
length, was preserved in the cabinet of
Colonel Gibbs. Professor Silliman possessed
another fine one, seven inches in
length.
The mountains in Colorado have yielded
some fine specimens. But the finest
of the beryl species come from Russia.
In the Ural Mountains the crystals are
small, but of fine color; in the Altai
Mountains they are very large and of a
greenish blue; but in the granitic ledges
of Odon Tchelon in Daouria, on the frontier
of China, they are found in the greatest
perfection. They occur on the summit
of the mountain in irregular veins of
micaceous and white indurated clay, and
are greenish-yellow, pure pale green,
greenish-blue and sky-blue. The chief
matrix of the beryl all over the world
is graphic granite, but it may occur in
other rocks. The light green stones of
Limoges in France appear in a vein of
quartz traversing granite. At Royalston
we observed them to spring seemingly
from the felspar and project into smoky
quartz, becoming more transparent as
they advanced into the harder stone.
The beryl possesses the same crystalline
form and specific gravity as the emerald,
but its hardness (especially in the
yellow varieties) is sometimes greater.
The only perceptible difference in the
two stones is in the color. Cleaveland
thought that as the emerald and beryl
had the same essential characters, they
might gradually pass into each other;
and Klaproth, finding the oxides of both
chrome and iron in one specimen, was
led to take the same view. The crystals
of true emerald are almost always small
(with the exception of those found in the
Wald district in Siberia), whilst those of
the beryl vary from a few grains to
more than a ton in weight. The crystals
of both are almost invariably regular
hexahedral prisms, sometimes slightly
modified. Those of the beryl we sometimes
find quite flat, as though they had
been compressed by force: then again
they are acicular and of extraordinary
length, considering their slender diameter.
Sometimes their lateral faces are
longitudinally striated, and as deeply as
the tourmaline, so that the edges of the
prism are rendered indistinct. Other
crystals are curved, and some perforated
in the axis like the tourmaline, so as to
contain other minerals. Sometimes they
are articulated like the pillars of basalt,
and separated at some distance by the
intervening quartz. These modified
forms give rise to curious speculations
as to their formation and origin. If we
admit the action of fire (which is improbable),
then the separation may be
easily explained; but if we insist that
they were deposited in the wet way and
by slow process, how can we account
for the dislocation? "By electricity,"
whispers a friend—"by telluric magnetism,
that wonderful unexplained and
mysterious force which has caused the
grand geological changes of the globe,
and is still at work."
No other gem has been counterfeited
with such perfection as the emerald; and
in fact it is utterly impossible to distinguish
the artificial from the real gems by
the aid of the eye alone: even the little
flaws which lull the suspicions of the
inexperienced are easily produced by a
dexterous blow from the mallet of the
skilled artisan. Not only emeralds, but
most of the gems and precious stones,
are now imitated with such consummate
skill as to deceive the eye, and
none but experts are aware of the extent
to which these fictitious gems are worn
in fashionable society, for oftentimes the
wearers themselves imagine that they
possess the real stones. There is not one
in a hundred jewelers who is acquainted
with the physical properties of the gems,
and very few can distinguish the diamond
from the white zircon or the white
topaz, the emerald from the tourmaline
of similar hue, the sapphire from iolite,
or the topaz from the Bohemian yellow
quartz. Jewelers are governed generally
by sight, which they believe to be infallible,
whilst hardness and specific gravity
are the only sure tests.
Artificial gems rivaling in beauty of
color the most brilliant and delicately
tinted of the productions of Nature are
now made at Paris and in other European
cities. The establishments at
Septmoncel in the Jura alone employ a
thousand persons, and fabulous quantities
of the glittering pastes are made
there and sent to all parts of the world.
A fine specimen of prase when cut
affords a fair imitation of the emerald.
The green fluor-spar which Haüy called
"emeraude de Carthagène" may also be
substituted, but the application of the
file detects the trick with ease. Some of
the green tourmalines approach the emeralds
in hue very closely, and by artificial
light it is impossible to distinguish
them from each other. Fragments of
quartz may be stained by being steeped
in green-colored tinctures. The Greeks
stained quartz so like the real gem that
Pliny exclaimed against the fraud while
declining to tell how it was done. The
Ancona rubies at the present day are
made by plunging quartz into a hot
tincture of cochineal, which penetrates
the minute fissures of the rock.
But notwithstanding the high art reached
by modern glass-makers, they are yet
far behind the ancients in imitating the
emerald in point of hardness and lustre.
Many emerald pastes of Roman times
still extant are with difficulty distinguished
from the real gem, so much
harder and lustrous are they than modern
glass. The ancient Phoenician remains
found in the island of Sardinia
by Cavalier Cara in 1856 show fine color
in their enamels and glass-works. The
green pigment brought home from the
ruins of Thebes by Mr. Wilkinson was
shown by Dr. Ure to consist of blue
glass in powder, with yellow ochre and
colorless glass. From Greek inscriptions
dating from the period of the Peloponnesian
war we learn that there
were signets of colored glass among the
gems in the treasury of the Parthenon.
Of all the emerald imitations that have
descended to us from antiquity, none are
more remarkable, none more interesting
to the antiquary and historian, than the
famous Sacro Catino of the cathedral of
Genoa. This celebrated relic is a glass
dish or patera fourteen inches in width,
five inches in depth and of the richest
transparent green color, though disfigured
by several flaws. It was bestowed upon
the republic of Genoa by the Crusaders
after the capture of Caesarea in 1101,
and was regarded as an equivalent for
a large sum of money due from the
Christian army. It was traditionally believed
to have been presented to King
Solomon by the queen of Sheba, and
afterward preserved in the Temple, and
some accounts relate that it was used by
Christ at the institution of the Lord's
Supper. The Genoese received it with
so much veneration and faith that twelve
nobles were appointed to guard it, and
it was exhibited but once a year, when
a priest held it up in his hand to the
view of the passing throng. The state
in 1319, in a time of pressing need,
pawned the holy relic for twelve hundred
marks of gold (two hundred thousand
dollars), and redeemed it with a
promptness which proved its belief in
the reality of the material as well as in
its sanctity. And it is also related that
the Jews, during a period of fifty years,
lent the republic four million francs,
holding the sacred relic as a pledge of
security. Seven hundred years passed
away, when Napoleon came, and as he
swept down over Italy, gathering her
art-treasures, he ordered the "Holy
Grail" to be conveyed to Paris. It was
deposited in the Cabinet of Antiquities
in the Imperial Library, and the mineralogists
quickly discovered it to be
glass. It is due to the memory of
Condamine to state that he was the first to
doubt the material of the Sacro Catino,
for, when examining it by lamplight in
1757, in the presence of the princes Corsini,
he observed none of the cracks,
clouds and specks common to emeralds,
but detected little bubbles of air. In
1815 the Allies ordered its return to the
cathedral of Genoa. During this journey
the beautiful relic was broken, but
its fragments were restored by a skillful
artisan, and it is now supported upon a
tripod, the fragments being held together
by a band of gold filigree. This remarkable
object of antiquity, which is
of extraordinary beauty of material and
workmanship, furnishes a theme over
which the antiquaries love to muse and
wrangle.
Another of the antique monster emeralds,
weighing twenty-nine pounds, was
presented to the abbey of Reichenau
near Constance by Charlemagne. Beckman
has also detected this precious relic
to be glass. And probably the great
emerald of two pounds weight brought
home from the Holy Land by one of the
dukes of Austria, and now deposited in
the collection at Vienna, is of the same
material. The hardness of our glass is
yet far inferior to that of the ancients,
and even the ruby lustre of the potters
of Umbria, which was so precious to the
dilettanti of the Cinque Cento period, has
not been recovered.
The emerald has been a subject of
controversy among the chemists and
mineralogists, and its character, especially
the cause of its beautiful color, is not
clearly defined even at the present day.
But that distinguished chemist, Professor
Lewy of Paris, seems to offer, thus far,
the most correct and plausible theory.
Ten years ago he boldly asserted that
the hue is not due to the oxide of chromium,
and with this opinion he confronted
such eminent men as Vauquelin,
Klaproth and others of high rank in the
scientific world. Not content with his
researches in his laboratory in Paris, he
resolutely crossed the ocean and sought
the emerald in its parent ledges in the
lofty table-lands of New Granada. Here
he obtained new information of a
geological character which goes far to
strengthen his position. The experiments
of M. Lewy indicate, if they do
not prove, that the coloring matter of
the emerald is organic, and readily destroyed
by heat, which would not be the
case if it was due to the oxide of chromium.
All my own fire-tests with the
Granada emerald corroborate the views
of M. Lewy, for in every instance the
gem lost its hue when submitted to a
red heat.
Nevertheless, the recent researches of
Wöhler and Rose give negative results.
These experienced chemists kept
an emerald at the temperature of melted
copper for an hour, and found that, although
the stone had become opaque,
the color was not affected. They therefore
considered the oxide of chromium
to be the coloring agent, without, however,
denying the presence of organic
matter. The amount of the oxide of
chromium found by many chemists varies
from one to two per cent., while
Lewy and others found it in a quantity
so small as to be inappreciable, and too
minute to be weighed.
Before the ordinary blowpipe the emerald
passes rapidly into a whitish vesicular
glass, and with borax it forms a
fine green glass, while its sub-species,
the beryl, changes into a colorless bead:
with salt of phosphorus it slowly dissolves,
leaving a silicious skeleton.2
M. Lewy visited the mines at Muzo
in Granada, and from the results of his
analyses, together with the fact of finding
emeralds in conjunction with the
presence of fossil shells in the limestone
in which they occur, he arrived at the
conclusion that they have been formed
in the wet way—deposited from a chemical
solution. He also found that when
extracted they are so soft and fragile
that the largest and finest fragments can
be reduced to powder by merely rubbing
them between the fingers, and the crystals
often crack and fall to pieces after
being removed from the mine, apparently
from loss of water. Consequently,
when the emeralds are first extracted
they are laid aside carefully for a few
days until the water is evaporated.
This statement relative to the softness
of the gem and its subsequent hardening
has been met with a shout of derision
from some of the gem-seekers—none
louder than that of Barbot, the retired
jeweler. Barbot seems to forget that the
rock of which his own house in Paris is
constructed undergoes the same change
after being removed from the deep quarries
in the catacombs under the city.
This phenomenon is observed with many
rocks. Flints acquire additional toughness
by the evaporation of water contained
in them. The steatite of St. Anthony's
Falls grows harder on exposure,
and other minerals when quarried from
considerable depths become firmer on
exposure to the action of the air. Observations
of this kind led Kuhlman to
investigate the cause, and he believes that
the hardening of rocks is not owing solely
to the evaporation of quarry-water,
but that it depends upon the tendency
which all earthy matters possess to undergo
a spontaneous crystallization by
slow dessication, which commences the
moment the rock is exposed to the air.
The coloring matter of the emerald
seems to be derived from the decomposition
of the remains of animals who
have lived in a bygone age, and whose
remains are now found fossilized in the
rock which forms the matrix of the gem.
This rock in Granada is a black limestone,
with white veins containing ammonites.
Specimens of these rocks exhibiting
fragments of emeralds in situ,
and also ammonites, are to be seen in
the mineralogical gallery of the Jardin
des Plantes in Paris. Lewy believes that
the beautiful tint of these gems is produced
by an organic substance, which
he considers to be a carburet of hydrogen,
similar to that called chlorophyll,
which constitutes the coloring matter of
the leaves of plants; and he has shown
that the emeralds of the darkest hue,
which contain the greatest amount of organic
matter, lose their color completely
at a low red heat, and become opaque
and white; while minerals and pastes
which are well known to be colored by
chromium, like the green garnets (the
lime-chrome garnets) of Siberia, are unchanged
in hue by the action of heat.
Since the time of the Spanish Conquest,
New Granada has furnished the
world with the most of its emeralds.
The most famous mines are at Muzo, in
the valley of Tunca, between the mountains
of New Granada and Popayan,
about seventy-five miles from Santa Fé
de Bogota, where every rock, it is said,
contains an emerald. At present the
supply of emeralds is very limited, owing
to restrictions on trade and want of
capital and energy in mining operations.
Blue as well as green emeralds are
found in the Cordillera of the Cubillari.
The Esmeraldas mines in Equador are
said to have been worked successfully
at one period by the Jesuits. The Peruvians
obtained many emeralds from
the barren district of Atacama, and in
the times of the Conquest there were
quarries on the River of Emeralds near
Barbacoas.
Emeralds are found in Siberia, and
some of the localities may have furnished
to the ancients the Scythian gems
which Pliny and others mention. In
the Wald district magnificent crystals
have been found embedded in mica-slate.
One of these—a twin-crystal, now
in the Imperial Cabinet at St. Petersburg—is
seven inches long, four inches broad,
and weighs four and a half pounds.
There is another mass in the same collection
which measures fourteen inches
long by twelve broad and five thick,
weighing sixteen and three-quarter
pounds troy. This group shows twenty
crystals from a half inch to five inches
long, and from one to two inches broad.
They were discovered by a peasant cutting
wood near the summit of the mountain.
His eye was attracted by the lustrous
sparkling amongst the decomposed
mica and where the ground had been
exposed by the uprooting of a tree by
the violence of the wind. He collected
a number of the crystals, and brought
them to Katharineburg and showed them
to M. Kokawin, who recognized them
and sent them to St. Petersburg, where
they were critically examined by Van
Worth and pronounced to be emeralds.
One of these crystals was presented by
the emperor to Humboldt when he visited
St. Petersburg, and it is now deposited
in the Berlin collection. Quite a
number of emeralds are now brought
from the Siberian localities, and it is believed
that enterprise and capital would
produce a large supply of the gem.3
The supply of emeralds from South
America is very limited, and may be
ascribed to want of skillful mining, as
well as to climate, the political condition
of the country and the indolence of its
inhabitants. The localities cannot be
exhausted, for they are too numerous
and extensive. The elevated regions in
Granada admit of scientific exploration
by Europeans, and at the present day
the only emerald-mining operations conducted
in South America have been
prosecuted near Santa Fé de Bogota by
a French company, which has paid the
government fourteen thousand dollars
yearly for the right of mining, all the
emeralds obtained being sent to Paris
to be cut by the lapidaries of that city.
In the Atacama districts, and along
the banks of the River of Emeralds, the
physical obstructions are difficult to
overcome, and pestilential diseases of
malignant character forbid the long sojourn
of the European. Yet the introduction
of Chinese labor may prove
successful and highly remunerative,
since the coolie reared among the jungles
and rice-swamps of Southern China is
quite as exempt from malarial fevers as
the negro.
The price of the emerald has no fixed
and extended scale, like that of the diamond,
and the fluctuations of its value
during the past three centuries form an
interesting chapter in the history of gems.
In the time of Dutens (1777) the price
of small stones of the first quality was
one louis the carat; one and a half carats,
five louis; two carats, ten louis; and
beyond this weight no rule of value could
be established. In De Boot's day (1600)
emeralds were so plenty as to be worth
only a quarter as much as the diamond.
The markets were glutted with the frequent
importations from Peru, and thirteen
years before the above-mentioned
period one vessel brought from South
America two hundred and three pounds
of fine emeralds, worth at the present
valuation more than seven millions of
dollars. At the beginning of this century,
according to Caire, they were worth
no more than twenty-four francs (or
about five dollars) the carat, and for a
long time antecedent to 1850 they were
valued at only fifteen dollars the carat.
Since this period they have become very
rare, and their valuation has advanced
enormously. In fact, the value of the emerald
now exceeds that of the diamond,
and is rapidly approaching the ratio
fixed by Benevenuto Cellini in the middle
of the sixteenth century, which rated
the emerald at four times, and the ruby
at eight times, the value of the diamond.
Perfect stones (the emerald is exceedingly
liable to flaw, the beryl is more free,
and the green sapphire is rarely impaired
by fissures or cracks) of one carat in
weight are worth at the present day two
hundred dollars in gold. Perfect gems
of two carats weight will command five
hundred dollars in gold, while larger
stones are sold at extravagant prices.
Most of our aqua-marinas come from
Brazil and Siberia, and small stones are
sold at trifling prices. Some of them,
however, when perfect and of fine color,
command fabulous sums. The superb
little beryl found at Mouzzinskaia is valued
by the Russians at the enormous
sum of one hundred and twenty thousand
dollars, although the crystal weighs
but little more than one ounce. Another
rough prism preserved in the Museum
at Paris, and weighing less than one
hundred grains, has received the tempting
offer of fifteen thousand francs.
A.C. HAMLIN, M.D.
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