MINERALS IN ART AND ARCHEOLOGY — GETTENS 557 



Flint is another cryptocrystalline variety of quartz and is allied to 

 chalcedony, but it is opaque, usually in gray, brown, or even smoky 

 tones. It was of prime importance to primitive man for tool and 

 implement making because it could so easily be worked by flaking. 

 Because of its dull color it was not much used for art forms, even for 

 small sculpture, but many will agree that a finely worked flint knife 

 or spear point is an artistic creation. Agatized or petrified wood is 

 still another variety of quartz, and when well banded and streaked 

 with red from iron oxide, it can be worked like onyx into attractive 

 book ends and other sculptural forms. 



Some copper minerals, because of the bright colors, have been em- 

 ployed for small sculptures and inlays. Perhaps the best known is 

 banded malachite or green basic copper carbonate, which the Kussians 

 got in considerable quantities from the Ural Mountains and worked 

 into all sorts of shapes. A remarkable pair of large bronze vases clad 

 with Russian malachite and ornamented with gilt bronze fittings is 

 shown mounted on pedestals at the Natural'History Building of the 

 U.S. National Museum. They came from the collection of Prince 

 Demidoff and Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, his wife. Visitors to the 

 Hermitage and museums of Moscow speak of the extraordinary 

 amount of malachite lapidary and inlay work that can be seen there. 

 The banding of alternate layers of dark green and light green seen 

 in botryoidal masses of malachite produces interesting designs in inlay 

 and mosaic. 



The use of turquoise, which is basic hydrous aluminum phosphate 

 tinted with copper, as a lapidary mineral is well known to those who 

 are familiar with the Indian-made silver jewelry of the American 

 Southwest. An outstanding example is the pre-Columbian turquoise 

 necklace and eardrops found by the Pueblo Bonito expedition in New 

 Mexico now on display at the National Geographic Society in Wash- 

 ington [16]. Turquoise was also employed effectively by Chinese 

 silversmiths and goldsmiths for embellishing elaborately worked 

 brooches and bracelets [17]. The Chinese gold and turquoise scepter 

 in the Freer Gallery collection has been rightfully termed a "royal 

 piece." Large pieces of carved turquoise are rare, but a Buddha 

 carved from turquoise exhibited in the Harvard University collection 

 of minerals and another in the Natural History Building of the U.S. 

 National Museum are several inches high. A half-dozen bronze cere- 

 monial dagger-axes at the Freer Gallery of Art are lavishly inlaid 

 with small square-cut turquoise chips like the tessarae used in mosaic 

 (pi. 4, fig. 2). 



Even some of the rarer minerals are used for lapidary purposes. 

 A figure of the Chinese god of longevity, Shou-lao-hsien, carved in an 

 altered form of yellow and black crocidolite called "tiger eye," was re- 

 cently added to the mineral collection of the U.S. National Museum. 



