Portal logo
TOURMALINE
Early in the eighteenth century some children of Holland, playing on a warm summer's day in a courtyard with a few bright colored stones, noticed that these possessed a strange power when warmed by the heat of the sun. They attracted and held ashes and straws. On reporting this strange discovery to their parents the latter, it is said, could give no explanation of the curious property, but left a record of their knowledge of it in the name of "aschentreckers," or "ash-drawers," which they gave the stones, and by which they were known for a long time.
This was the method of introduction to the civilized world of the mineral now known as tourmaline, a mineral which in variety of color, composition, and properties is of considerable interest in Nature.
The lapidaries who had given the Dutch children the stones for play­things did not recognize them as different from the other gems with which they were accustomed to deal. So to the present day, although tour­maline is considerably used in jewelry, it is rarely ever called by that name. The green varieties are often known as Brazilian emerald, chrys­olite, or peridot, some varieties of blue as Brazilian sapphire, others as indicolite, the colorless as achroite, and the red as rubellite, siberite, and even as ruby.
It is only somewhat recently that these different stones have been recognized as being varieties of a single mineral species which is known by the name tourmaline. This name comes from a Cingalese word {turamali), which was applied to the first tourmaline gems sent from Ceylon to Holland.
At one time the name schorl was chiefly applied to the species. This was before the means of distinguishing mineral species were as well understood as they are now, and a large number of minerals, and even rocks, were included under the name schorl. One by one, however, they were distinguished by separate names until schorl included only tourma­line, and shortly afterward the name schorl was dropped altogether.
In its opaque form, colored either black or brown, tourmaline is a comparatively common mineral. It accompanies many so-called meta-morphic rocks, and is also common in granite and other eruptive rocks.
111