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Gem Trader
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inexhaustible, and after several centuries of working, few crumbs of the precious material were left to the posterity of the industrious townsmen. Minerals do not renew themselves in the bowels of Earth as denuded forests may do. To survive, the men of Idar had to get their agate elsewhere. Need and enterprise, two important factors in the affairs of men, caused many of the younger generation to go to distant parts of the globe in search of agate and other minerals suited to their industry.
So it is that nowadays not only agates, but also more sought after and rarer gem material go to Idar from South and Central America, and notably from Brazil. But it must not be imagined that the Idar district of the Rhine Valley or Brazil have any monopoly in agate itself. The mineral occurs in England, Scotland, North as well as South America, India, South Africa and Australia; so that it is pretty well distributed all over the world and is fairly common.
Agate has many names. When you hear the sonorous word chalcedony, which occurs often in the pages of the Bible, you might remember that this is another name for agate. So, too, is bloodstone. There are, in fact, at least a dozen varieties of agate known, each distinguished mainly by its colour, which ranges from white to all shades of brown and green and black. Some are spotted, others-like onyx—are banded, and one kind, the so-called moss agate, displays a pattern which, as its name implies, looks as though particles of moss were embedded in the stone. But in reality there is no vegetable matter in the moss
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