About SemiPrecious Stones: Adamantine Spar, Alabaster, Amatrice, Amazonite, Azurite

The mineral world contains many beautiful materials that are without the pale which encloses the clearly defined gem stones; these "outlanders" may be classed as semi-precious stones that are only occasionally used, and while many are truly beautiful and others are interesting, because of rarity or peculiarities, all lack some quality--usually a sufficient degree of hardness--which would admit them into the patrician rank of Precious Stones. Because of their intense scientific interest, technical mineralogists, who have written books about gems, not only include but devote considerable space to minerals that will not meet the eye of one manufacturing jeweller or gem dealer in one hundred, or ever be seen by one gem buyer in thousands. These stones are usually not so rare in nature as they are in stores, and their cutting and mounting is usually the result of an individual order; otherwise they are collected and cut only for collector's specimens. Brief mention will be here given to some of the minerals that occasionally appear and are included in the stocks of the principal stone merchants. In the American market there is a difference in this respect between the market east of the Pacific coast cities and localities near them or close to the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras, because that mountainous region is a great mineral treasure house, yielding many welcome finds of attractive and beautiful semi-precious stones; therefore in San Francisco, Denver, and other Western cities, these local minerals are used in jewelry to a greater extent than they are in the midland cities and those of the Eastern States.

Among the stones most likely to appear from time to time in the shops are:

ADAMANTINE SPAR, which includes hairbrown varieties of corundum.

ALABASTER. Although its uses in the arts are principally as a material for carvings, statuettes, and other ornamental objects, alabaster is frequently worked up into beads, pins, and other jewelry. Alabaster is a fine-grained white or clouded variety of gypsum; it holds a place so low in the Mohs scale of hardness--2--that it seems absurd, in this respect, to class it with even the semi-precious stones.

AMATRICE is a recently discovered mineral, qualified more or less for inclusion in the gem family. Exploited as a gem mineral by its discoverers and miners it is eagerly sought for by collectors. Amatrice was discovered in the Stansbury range at the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, in Tooele County, Utah. It is heralded as a combination of variscite and wardite, in conjunction with crypto-crystalline quartz, chalcedony, sodium oxide, and traces of iron and potassium. This mineral is green, somewhat resembling turquoise matrix, but its chromatic variation is its most remarkable characteristic, no two stones being alike. Its hardness is between six and seven. Amatrice is offered now in cut form. The foster-parents of amatrice originated its name from the fact that it is distinctly an American matrix.

AMAZONITE, or amazonstone, is a beautiful bluish green mineral found in Siberia and Scotland and also at Pike's Peak, Colorado; hardness 6.5. Amazonstone, with aventurine, is now classed by mineralogists with microline, one of the feldspars, which occurs massive and in triclinic crystals.