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JADE.
The word jade is magical in itself. It calls up first a narrow,
curving street in Singapore, within whose low, crowded shops, frequented
exclusively by Chinamen, looking anything but luxurious,
there was enough jade on sale to stock a nation. At this pivotal point
all ships and all races meet, but trade is carried on largely by the
Mongolian, and to him there is no bracelet more beautiful, no ring
more desirable, than one of jade. And he is half right, too.
Another picture is of Rangoon, Burmah. Here too we were
looking for jade. Out of the depths of the little shop, as we were
leaving without purchase, came a smiling Chinaman, hitherto unseen,
wearing a short silk sack of an indescribable color, and bearing in
his hand a jade bracelet of exactly the same hue !
Our hearts jumped; for never had we seen a piece so beautiful;
a perfect monotone of the most wonderful gray-blue; like the superb
masses of clouds piled high in the eastern horizon when the
that Oriental land.
glory of sunset is upon
The man knew he possessed a gem, rarely seen, scarcely known ;
and backed up by the rich brocade,
its charm was doubled. Needless
to say, he obtained the twelve American dollars from which he would
not abate one penny, though we walked some distance away before
finally surrendering.
Later, in Ceylon, a star sapphire was obtained, as like the bracelet
in elusive coloring as a daughter is sometimes like her mother.
What artists are these Orientals ! Here
was one of the rarest
tints in the world. Yet the Chinaman had matched it in his rich
garment, and at Colombo its worthy companion was found in a shade
of corundum.
The nephritoids embrace nephrite, jadeite and chloromelanite.
Both in French and English these are always referred to as jade.
Nephrite belongs to the hornblende group; jadeite and chloromelanite
to the pyroxene. In spite of the fact that they are classed
mineralogically into two groups, they resemble one another closely.
Their hardness is as a rule scarcely that of quartz, but on account
of a fibrous structure, the stones are exceptionally tough and more
difficult to fracture, for commercial purposes, than any
mineral world particularly nephrite. Nothwithstanding
other in the
its fibrous
nature, the substance in each case, when polished, appears to the
naked eye perfectly homogeneous, with rather the appearance of
fused material.
Nephritoids are opaque, or at most translucent. Sometimes
they are brightly colored, but as rule are inconspicuous green, gray,
or white. They have always been highly esteemed by primitive peo-
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