THE LAPIDARY’S BOARD; AND HIS WORKSHOP.
In some of our provincial towns along the coast, the open door and cheerful bow-window of the lapidary, generally situated in the best street, form a coup d’œil which can hardly fail of enticing a visitor to look in once during his morning walk.
If he should do this, he will probably become aware, by a certain whirring sound, that there is an inner room which serves for a workshop. This latter I have always been partial to: but as the contents of the show-room are the most attractive, I will speak of them first, reserving to the end of the chapter a description of the lapidary’s wheel and other implements of his trade.
Let us suppose that we are in the pretty town of Sidmouth in South Devon. Somebody wishes for a jet bead to replace one missing from a bracelet, and we sally forth in quest of a jeweller’s shop, but come first upon that of his cousin the lapidary, which may probably do as well. Entering the doorway, a gigantic “snakestone” from Whitby, flanks the threshold on one side; and on the other a lump of iron ore, of some two hundred weight, keeps company with a quartz agate of equally cyclopean dimensions. These are striking objects: and instinctively we pause for a moment and consider whence they came. One of them has been washed out of the ribs of the conglomerate: another, after being dug from the bowels of the earth, was sent aloft by the miners as lumber: the third, once the shell of a living ammonite, must have lain for thousands of years in its cemetery of limestone rock, and was only disinterred when some northern contractor, reckless probably of fossil remains, but wide-awake to the actualities of his own generation, was excavating for a railway tunnel. Inland productions these, for the most part. But the threshold is only introductory: pass a few steps onward, and we shall handle substances which are as strictly marine as “crassicornis” or tangle.
The interior of the shop is fitted up with a massive semicircular dresser of elm or maple, some four feet in height, and perhaps half as many in width. This is heaped with specimens culled from various beaches, and several convenient shelves are similarly adorned; the polished stones lying in open trays, but set at an angle so as best to reflect the light. The eyeless head of a Saurian, a creature belonging to an extinct race, is suspended from the ceiling; and a stuffed cormorant, a well-known sea-bird of our own day, mounted on a rude tripod of fir-bough, fills the only spare niche in the apartment. But there is no study or affectation in all this: it is as genuine as the tent of shipwrecked Crusoe. The lapidary has from the first felt himself at home with Nature, and has found room for many of her devices and eccentricities, which he could not now bear to turn out of doors. Neither are we inclined to quarrel with him about his arrangements, though his shop exhibits nothing which will remind us of a frontage in Pall Mall or Bond Street. Moreover, when we look a little closer, he is not such a mere dreamer after all. Commerce has not been forgotten, nor is a certain kind of elegance lacking. Those well-washed panes of crown-glass are decorated with wisps of dried sea-weed more delicate than ostrich-feathers, and which serve the purpose of a hygrometer. And, interspersed with these, are sundry nuggets of amber, bones of the cuttle-fish for your pounce-box, and a string of veritable jet-beads: from which latter we at once select our purchase.
But we are now standing before the central counter, and our attention is drawn to the curious and beautiful fossils which lie upon it. We take up one to which the late Dr. Mantell kindly gave the name of a “choanite.” In doing this, he not only adopted a foundling, but conferred endless benefit upon the lapidaries. Nothing will sell in this country without a name: the appellation chosen by the Doctor was judged suitable, and a large and increasing sale of the fossil has followed upon it. This one is of a portly size; and the lapidary, after slicing it in two, has polished one of the flat surfaces. The internal structure revealed by this section is not unlike the corolla of a daisy, and at once reminds us of the living zoophyte called “actinia bellis.” Choanite means “funnel-body:” and the creature which lies here petrified must, when alive, have been globular or pyriform, with many tubular arms branching out from one central trunk.
The petrifaction has been faithful to its prototype: the several tubes being now charged with limestone, and the space between them, once a gelatinous substance, still retaining that appearance in a medium of semi-pellucid chalcedony.
ALCYONIUM DIGITATUM.
By the side of the choanite is another fossil, which we now call an “alcyonite:” the learned name of the nearest living species being “alcyonium digitatum.” It is known in the Isle of Wight as “deadman’s fingers.” Despite the above unpleasing nickname, this is a most beautiful fossil. Its outer form resembles that of a branching ice-plant: while a polished section of one of the stems shows filaments all lying in the direction of the axis, and exhibiting in their cut ends an effect not unlike that of the granulations in a slice from a fresh cucumber. When the pith, as sometimes happens, is particoloured, I do not know a more desirable stone for the cabinet.