Sapphire, one of the earliest gems known to man, is found in riverbeds and torrents, the force of the water washing the stones from their matrix ; and to this day are still found under these conditions. In its finest quality the Sapphire is of a deep blue colour, and the more it resembles the dark velvety blue of the Pansy the greater is its value.

Of coloured gems, the Sapphire has been the most venerated amongst all nations, and particularly in the East it is the stone most frequently consecrated to the various deities. Amongst Buddhists it is believed to produce a desire for prayer, and is regarded as the Stone of Stones to give Spiritual Light, and to bring Peace and Happiness as long as its wearer leads a moral life.

In the early days of the Christian Church, the stones and metal used in making the ring of a Bishop was left very much to the taste of the individual, but in the twelfth century Innocent III decreed that these rings should be made of pure gold, set with an unengraved stone, the Sapphire being the gem selected, as possessing the virtues and qualities essential to its dignified position as the badge of Pontifical rank and “a seal of secrets,” for there be many things “that a priest conceals from the senses of the vulgar and less intelligent ; which he keeps locked up as it were under seal.”

Of this gem St. Jerome writes that “it procures favours with princes, pacifies enemies, frees from enchantment, and obtains freedom from captivity.”

The Jews also held this stone in high veneration, the seal-stone in the ring of King Solomon being said to be a Sapphire, and in Exodus xxiv. 10, we read in the description of a manifestation of Jehovah :

“There was under his feet as it were a paved work of a Sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness.”

This description of clearness, if taken as meaning transparency, would indicate a familiarity with the qualities of the stone as we know it, although in most of the ancient writings all blue stones are loosely described as Sapphires, including the Tables of the Law, which it is practically certain could not have been of Sapphire and in all probability were of Lapis Lazuli.

During the Middle Ages the qualities attributed to the Sapphire were that it preserved Chastity, discovered Fraud and Treachery, protected from poison, Plague, Fever, and Skin Diseases, and had great power in resisting black magic and illwishing ; in smallpox it preserved the eyes from injury if rubbed on them. It also gave concentration ; but if worn by an intemperate or impious person, it lost its lustre, thus indicating the presence of vice and impurity. It is recorded that in the Church of Old St. Paul’s, London, there was a famous Sapphire given by “Richard de Preston, Citizen and Grocer of that city, for the cure of infirmities in the eyes of those thus afflicted who might resort to it.”

Cloudy Sapphires are sometimes found which owing to a peculiarity in their composition show six rays of light running from the top of the stone. These are known as Asteria, or Star Stones, and this Star Sapphire was much valued by the Ancients as a love charm ; they considered it peculiarly powerful for the procuring of favours, for bringing good fortune and averting witchcraft. Six is the number given to Venus, and is also the number of the true Solomon’s Seal, whose virtues and qualities this stone represents.

The wife of the Emperor Charlemagne is reputed to have possessed a very powerful talisman composed of two rough Sapphires and a portion of the Holy Cross, made by the Magi in the train of Haaroon Al Raschid, Emperor of the East. This Talisman was made for the purpose of keeping Charlemagne’s affections constant to his wife, and it was so efficacious that his love endured after her death. He would not allow the body, on which the Talisman hung, to be interred, even when decomposition had set in ; and burial was only permitted when Charlemagne’s confessor, who knew of the talisman and its virtue, removed it from the body. The confessor kept the Talisman and was raised to high honours by Charlemagne, becoming Archbishop of Mainz and Chancellor of the Empire. It was, however, restored to the monarch on his death-bed when he was suffering great agony, and it enabled him to pass peacefully away.

There are, however, certain minerals which possess distinctive features in their qualities of hardness, colour, transparency, refractability or double refractability to light-beams, which qualities place them in an entirely different class to the minerals of a metallic nature. These particular and non-metallic minerals, therefore, because of their comparative rarity, rise pre-eminently above other minerals, and become actually “precious.”

This is, at the same time, but a comparative term, for it will readily be understood that in the case of a sudden flooding of the market with one class of stone, even if it should be one hitherto rare and precious, there would be an equally sudden drop in the intrinsic value of the jewel to such an extent as perhaps to wipe it out of the category of precious stones. For instance, rubies were discovered long before diamonds; then when diamonds were found these were considered much more valuable till their abundance made them common, and they became of little account. Rubies again asserted their position as chief of all precious stones in value, and in many biblical references rubies are quoted as being the symbol of the very acme of wealth, such as in Proverbs, chapter iii., verses 13 and 15, where there are the passages, “happy is the man that findeth wisdom … she is more precious than rubies”–and this, notwithstanding the enormous quantity of them at that time obtained from the ruby mines of Ophir and Nubia, which were then the chief sources of wealth.

It will also be remembered that Josephus relates how, at the fall of Jerusalem, the spoil of gold was so great that Syria was inundated with it, and the value of gold there quickly dropped to one-half; other historians, also, speaking of this time, record such a glut of gold, silver, and jewels in Syria, as made them of little value, which state continued for some considerable period, till the untold wealth became ruthlessly and wastefully scattered, when the normal values slowly reasserted themselves.

Amongst so many varieties of these precious minerals, it cannot be otherwise than that there should be important differences in their various characteristics, though for a stone to have the slightest claim to be classed as “precious” it must conform to several at least of the following requirements:–It must withstand the action of light without deterioration of its beauty, lustre, or substance, and it must be of sufficient hardness to retain its form, purity and lustre under the actions of warmth, reasonable wear, and the dust which falls upon it during use; it must not be subject to chemical change, decomposition, disintegration, or other alteration of its substance under exposure to atmospheric air; otherwise it is useless for all practical purposes of adornment or ornamentation.

There are certain other characteristics of these curious minerals which may be classified briefly, thus:–Some stones owe their beauty to a wonderful play of colour or fire, due to the action of light, quite apart from the colour of the stone itself, and of this series the opal may be taken as a type. In others, this splendid play of colour is altogether absent, the colour being associated with the stone itself, in its substance, the charm lying entirely in the superb transparency, the ruby being taken as an example of this class of stone. Others, again, have not only colour, but transparency and lustre, as in the coloured diamonds, whilst the commoner well-known diamonds are extremely rich in transparency and lustre, the play of light alone showing a considerable amount of brilliancy and beauty of colour, though the stone itself is clear. Still others are opaque, or semi-opaque, or practically free from play of light and from lustre, owing their value and beauty entirely to their richness of colour.

In all cases the value of the stone cannot be appreciated fully till the gem is separated from its matrix and polished, and in some cases, such as in that of the diamond, cut in variously shaped facets, on and amongst which the light rays have power to play; other stones, such as the opal, turquoise and the like, are cut or ground in flat, dome-shaped, or other form, and then merely polished. It frequently happens that only a small portion of even a large stone is of supreme value or purity, the cutter often retaining as his perquisite the smaller pieces and waste. These, if too small for setting, are ground into powder and used to cut and polish other stones.

Broadly speaking, the greatest claim which a stone can possess in order to be classed as precious is its rarity. To this may be added public opinion, which is led for better or worse by the fashion of the moment. For if the comparatively common amethyst should chance to be made extraordinarily conspicuous by some society leader, it would at once step from its humbler position as semi-precious, and rise to the nobler classification of a truly precious stone, by reason of the demand created for it, which would, in all probability, absorb the available stock to rarity; and this despite the more entrancing beauty of the now rarer stones.

The study of this section of mineralogy is one of intense interest, and by understanding the nature, environment, chemical composition and the properties of the stones, possibility of fraud is altogether precluded, and there is induced in the mind–even of those with whom the study of precious stones has no part commercially–an intelligent interest in the sight or association of what might otherwise excite no more than a mere glance of admiration or curiosity. There is scarcely any form of matter, be it liquid, solid, or gaseous, but has yielded or is now yielding up its secrets with more or less freedom to the scientist. By his method of synthesis (which is the scientific name for putting substances together in order to form new compounds out of their union) or of analysis (the decomposing of bodies so as to divide or separate them into substances of less complexity), particularly the latter, he slowly and surely breaks down the substances undergoing examination into their various constituents, reducing these still further till no more reduction is possible, and he arrives at their elements. From their behaviour during the many and varied processes through which they have passed he finds out, with unerring accuracy, the exact proportions of their composition, and, in many cases, the cause of their origin.

It may be thought that, knowing all this, it is strange that man does not himself manufacture these rare gems, such as the diamond, but so far he has only succeeded in making a few of microscopic size, altogether useless except as scientific curiosities. The manner in which these minute gems and spurious stones are manufactured, and the methods by which they may readily be distinguished from real, will be dealt with in due course.

The natural stones represent the slow chemical action of water, decay, and association with, or near, other chemical substances or elements, combined with the action of millions of years of time, and the unceasing enormous pressure during that time of thousands, perhaps millions, of tons of earth, rock, and the like, subjected, for a certain portion at least of that period, to extremes of heat or cold, all of which determine the nature of the gem. So that only in the earth itself, under strictly natural conditions, can these rare substances be found at all in any workable size; therefore they must be sought after assiduously, with more or less speculative risk.

There are several methods of obtaining the metallic element, zirconium; it is however with the silicate of zirconium that we have to deal at the moment.

This is called zircon, ZrSiO4, or hyacinth when transparent or red, but when smoke-coloured, or colourless, it is the jargoon, or jarcon, and is found in silt and alluvial soils, limestone, gneiss, and various forms of schist, in India, Australia, the Urals, and certain parts of America. It is often combined with and found in juxtaposition to gold and certain varieties of precious stones.

The lines of cleavage are parallel to the sides of the prism, and the crystals have an adamantine, or diamond lustre, varying from the completely opaque to the transparent. In some varieties the oxide of uranium is also present in traces. It crystallises in the 3rd (tetragonal) system, with indistinct[Pg 99] cleavage. Its specific gravity varies from 4.70 to 4.88, according to the specimen and the locality.

This stone, like some of the others described, has a very wide range of colour, going through reds, browns, greens, yellows, oranges, whites, greys, blues from light to indigo, notwithstanding which it is somewhat difficult to imitate scientifically, though its composition of 33 per cent. of silica with 67 per cent. of zirconia (the oxide of zirconium), is practically all it contains, apart from the colouring matter, such as the metallic oxides of iron, uranium, etc.

Its hardness is 7-1/2, consequently it is untouched by a file, and so far, if one or perhaps two of the three qualities of colour, hardness, and specific gravity, are obtained in a chemically made zircon, the third is wanting. Under the blowpipe, zircons are infusible, but the coloured stones when heated strongly become heavier, and as they are contracting, their colour fades, sometimes entirely, which changes are permanent, so that as they possess the adamantine lustre, they are occasionally cut like a diamond, and used as such, though their deficiency in fire and hardness, and their high specific gravity, make them readily distinguishable from the diamond.

On exposure to light the coloured zircon becomes more or less decoloured; especially is this so in sunlight, for when the direct rays of the sun fall upon it, the colours fade, and for a moment or two occasional phosphorescence follows, as is the case when the stone is warmed or heated in a dark room.

The stone appears to be very susceptible to brilliant light-rays, and in certain specimens which were split for testing, one half of each being kept excluded from light for purposes of[Pg 100] comparison, it was found that sunshine affected them most; then brilliant acetylene gas, which was more effective still when tinted yellow by being passed through yellow glass.

The electric arc was not so effective, but the electric light of the mercury-vapour lamp, though causing little change at the first, after a few hours’ exposure rapidly bleached certain of the colours, whilst having no effect on others.

Coal gas with incandescent fibre mantle was slightly effective, whilst the coal-gas, burned direct through an ordinary burner, affected very few of the colours, even after twenty-four hours’ exposure at a distance of three feet. In all these cases, though the colours were slightly improved by the stones being kept for a time in the dark, they failed to recover their original strength, showing permanent loss of colour.