The long journey was at last accomplished, and the omnibus set me down at the Royal Hotel; when three steps and a jump landed me upon the famous beach. It was crowded with persons of both sexes and all ages. I never saw so many backs bending at one time for the same purpose. They carried baskets, which gradually groaned under the weight of minerals amassed. For three days I joined the glad throng, comparing notes with many treasure-seekers, and collected some hundred and fifty stones possessing better pretensions to celebrity than the obviously worthless specimens.
I took them to one of the lapidary establishments. They are so kind at Rocksands in looking over visitors’ findings and pronouncing upon their merits. The lapidary establishment was crowded. At last my turn came. With beating heart I displayed my beach upon the counter. ‘Oh yes; that’s a fine red carnelian; that’s an onyx, that’s a topaz; that’s a mocha stone; that’s a weed-agate. If you’ll come on Saturday they shall be ready.’
I came, and received some beautiful foreign agates, cut and polished ready for brooches, such as are imported wholesale from Germany, where they work the lapidary-wheels by water-power, and prepare the foreign stones at small cost. At any seaside place, in the attractive shops on the esplanade, you can buy for a shilling a magnificent onyx or agate brooch. It cost me from two shillings to half-a-crown each to have my Rocksands treasures cut and polished! And what were the stones which I actually took to the lapidary? Nothing else than absolute rubbish—pebbles of coarse quartz, slate, and porphyry!
Some years after this a gentleman living at Rocksands collected a number of stones, principally ‘amethysts and carnelians,’ as he was told. He forwarded me two of his finest specimens. They were pebbles of inferior quartz, but I cut and polished them to convince him, and his eyes were opened to the truth. Another forwarded me a stone which had been in his possession for years, prized and habitually shown to friends as most valuable. I wrote back, ‘You found that stone at Rocksands, and were told that it was an amethyst. It is not worth stooping to pick up!’ He replied that I was correct in the locality, but asked me to cut and polish it, notwithstanding the unflattering verdict. I did so, and his eyes were likewise opened. Lapidaries are not, as a class, unprincipled, but some of them seem to find it hard to resist the temptation of imposing upon the simplicity of the public.
A few words about the topaz and amethyst. They belong to the magnificent sapphire group, very precious and exquisite crystals of alumina. Never by any possibility will such stones be found upon our beaches, unless some eccentric person sows them. They are Oriental gems, and I believe they have never been found in England. But there are crystals of quartz (pure flint) which closely resemble in colour and transparency the true topaz and amethyst. Such crystals are found on a large scale in cavities of rocks and mountains—e.g., in the ‘druses’ of the Alps. There are splendid crystals of smoky-brown and straw-coloured quartz found in the Grampian Mountains, known as ‘cairn-gorms.’ Now there is no reason why fragments of such crystals should not be found upon a beach rounded into pebbles, but I do not believe they have ever actually been found in England. A letter in a London daily paper some time ago stated that such amethysts were common in some parts of Ireland. It would be more correct to speak of them as pebbles of amethystine quartz. I have some good specimens of Irish amethysts from the Island of Achill. The so-called amethysts of Rocksands have no pretensions even to transparency.
If I were to tell you that in Cornwall they mend the roads with amethysts you might smile. But it is not so very far from the truth. I have a piece of granite picked up on a new-laid Cornish road full of beautiful crystals of amethystine quartz. The lady pebble-seekers and others might do well to travel west!
The pebbles we really do hope to find are moss-agates, ring-agates, chalcedonies, carnelians, choanites and other fossil-zoophytes, jaspers, conglomerates, shell-agates, variegated flints, and beetle-stones. There are besides large flint ‘geodes’ containing beautiful crystals of quartz, caskets of jewels from the chalk strata, but these are not suitable for cutting and polishing. It is fine exercise to go out with a stout hammer ‘flint-smashing’ under the cliffs of Beachy Head. Splendid treasures of crystal are to be found there, but they cannot be improved by artificial treatment.
Cairn-gorms are now very rare. I once made a pilgrimage into the heart of the Grampians, hoping to find some specimens, but without success. I also spent a day on the beaches of Loch Tay, having read in a mineralogical book that beautiful agates are to be obtained there, ‘in which the imaginative Highlander sees the lakes and mountains of his native land.’ There also I had no success; the nearest approach to agates that I found were fragments of old glass bottles; and I returned with the melancholy conviction that those bottles, when entire, must have contained a certain spirituous liquor dear to the heart of the ‘imaginative Highlander,’ under the influence of which his imagination was excited to set a false value upon the ‘chuckey stones’ at his feet.
A few simple definitions will assist progress. Chalcedony is a form of very pure translucent flint, often also transparent, sometimes tinted with delicate shades of blue, purple, pink, orange or brown. Choanite is the name given to a fossil-zoophyte of the sea-anemone class, with central funnel-shaped body (‘choanos’ is Greek for a funnel), and tentacles radiating from every part. Moss-agate is the pretty name given to chalcedonic pebbles, containing moss-like ramifications in various colours—pink, blue, black, orange, red, and yellow—due to the presence of metallic oxides, and often, no doubt, to the actual colouring matter of some zoophyte round which the pebble originally formed. Conglomerate pebbles contain fragments of chalcedony, flint, etc., embedded in a matrix of different character, presenting an appearance somewhat resembling almond-rock. Translucent, transmitting light, but not the outlines or colours of objects behind it. Transparent, transmitting light, and also the outlines and colours of objects behind the light.
Some of the best hunting-grounds for pebbles are the beaches of our south coast. Taking the map, we may notice in order Dover, Folkestone, New Romney, Dungeness, Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton, Worthing, Bognor, Littlehampton; in the Isle of Wight—Sandown, Shanklin, and Ventnor: the Chesil Beach, Seaton, and Sidmouth. Here are plenty of shingly beaches for you to choose from, and chalcedonic pebbles are common upon them all. So let us take a ramble, it does not much matter where.