variety,
such as canes, paper-weights, writing-cases, perfume-bottles,
fan-sticks, bracelets, watch-chains, and lace-pins, the latter in such
designs as shovels, picks, and other mining emblems. In certain new
furniture, it has been used as paneling; and here, as in jewelry, the
effect is better brought out by added colors, such as are afforded by
agate, moss agate, native silver in a matrix, smoky quartz, iron and
copper pyrite, cinnabar, malachite, turquoise in the matrix, and other
bright minerals. By slitting and piecing, as is done with malachite, an
entire table-top can be made from a few pounds of gold quartz. Much of
the jewelry made of this material is sold to tourists from the Eastern
States and elsewhere. Eleven hundred dollars worth was purchased, some
years ago, by an Asiatic embassy, and scarcely any one visiting
California fails to secure a specimen. The best taste is not often
exercised in the designs for this material. Many are too large and
ungainly for personal adornment, and others are not as well mounted as
the jewelry sold with them. There is much room for improvement in these
respects. One of the large designs made of gold quartz, representing
the Cathedral of Notre Dame, at Paris, is valued at $20,000. It stands
about a foot high, and is perhaps the finest piece of gold quartz work
ever produced. A mass of gold quartz1 weighing 160 pounds
was taken out of the bank of the Nevada Hydraulic Company at
Gibsonville, Cal. The boulder was smoothly washed and had the
appearance of having been ground in a pothole. Its estimated value was
$2,500, but its real worth was more than this, since it was valuable
for lapidary purposes. The gold penetrating amethystine quartz from
Hungary is very beautiful, but the California quartz is the finest
known.
Some
years ago a method was devised of fusing quartz, by throwing in lumps
of heavily alloyed gold, and allowing the material to cool in molds of
required shapes. It was said that the mingling of the metal and the
quartz was complete, but the quartz had a milky, unnatural, glasslike
appearance entirely unlike the gold quartz it was intended to
represent. The firm of LeDuc, Connor & Laine, in San Francisco,
applied for a patent for an imitation gold quartz produced by means of
electricity,
1 Jewelers' Circular, Vol. 14, p. 258, Sept., 1883.
