LECTURE 9. — CRYSTAL SORROWS
Working Lecture in Schoolroom.
L. We have been hitherto talking, children, as if crystals might live, and play, and quarrel, and behave ill or well, according to their characters, without interruption from anything else. But so far from this being so, nearly all crystals, whatever their characters, have to live a hard life of it, and meet with many misfortunes. If we could see far enough, we should find, indeed, that, at the root, all their vices were misfortunes: but to-day I want you to see what sort of troubles the best crystals have to go through, occasionally, by no fault of their own.
This black thing, which is one of the prettiest of the very few pretty black things in the world, is called "Tourmaline." It may be transparent, and green, or red, as well as black; and then no stone can be prettier (only, all the light that gets into it, I believe, comes out a good deal the worse; and is not itself again for a long while). But this is the commonest state of it,—opaque, and as black as jet.
MARY. What does "Tourmaline" mean?
L. They say it is Ceylanese, and I don't know Ceylanese, but we may always be thankful for a graceful word, whatever it means
MARY. And what is it made of?
L. A little of everything there's always flint and clay, and magnesia in it, and the black is iron, according to its fancy, and there's boracic acid if you know what that is and if you don't, I cannot tell you today, and it doesn't signify and there's potash, and soda, and, on the whole, the chemistry of it is more like a mediaeval doctor's prescription, than the making of a respectable mineral but it may, perhaps, be owing to the strange complexity of its make, that it has a notable habit which makes it, to me one of the most interesting of minerals. You see these two crystals are broken right across, in many places, just as if they had been shafts of black marble fallen from a ruinous temple, and here they lie, imbedded in white quartz, fragment succeeding fragment keeping the line of the original crystal, while the quartz fills up the intervening spaces Now tourmaline has a trick of doing this, more than any other mineral I know here is another bit which I picked up on the glacier of Macugnaga; it is broken, like a pillar built of very flat broad stones, into about thirty joints, and all these are heaved and warped away from each other sideways, almost into a line of steps, and then all is tilled up with quartz paste. And here, lastly is a green Indian piece, in which the pillar is first disjointed, and then wrung round into the shape of an S.