Physical Characteristics and Locations of Jade

JADE:

This word is a generic term used to designate a certain number of substances, which, while resembling each other in many characteristics, differ materially in their composition.

These common characteristics are great hardness: wonderful tenacity, a wavy or scaly fracture, a certain oily lustre, and tints of white, greenish-white, milk-white, and rose-white.

The best known variety is brought from China; it is a silicate of lime and magnesia, with traces of oxide of iron, and sometimes of oxide of manganese.

Another variety, greatly prized by the ancients for its miraculous power of curing colics and the bites of venomous insects, is called nephritic jade, or nephrite stone; it is of a pale-green colour, sometimes with a slight tinge of lilac.

Antique objects made of jade are so hard that they can only be cut by the diamond; and as these objects are many of them of considerable dimensions, and their number is too great to suggest such difficult labour, it is supposed that when this jade was taken from the mine it was easily cut, and afterwards attained its hardness by exposure to the air, or perhaps by the direct action of fire.

The jade of Saussure, found in Switzerland, is a species differing somewhat from the Indian jade; and the axe-stone jade is a product of South America. It has been called the amazon stone, and Humboldt says that the Caribbees used the jade stone as amulets, cut in the shape of the Persepolitan cylinders, longitudinally perforated, and covered with inscriptions.

The principal mines of European jade are in Turkey and in Poland, where it is wrought into knife-handles, daggers, &c., and is softer than the oriental jade.