ot 
320 An account of the New Jersey Sapphire. 
and white limestone. This bed of white limestone is quite detached 
and independent of the large bed heretofore described, and a high 
ridge intervenes between this and that bed. 
The sapphire is blue and white, the central color of a bright ber- 
lin blue, becoming pale till towards the edge of the mass the color is 
nearly white. In the feldspar, crystals of the red oxide of titanium 
commonly occur, of a bright steel gray with a tinge of red, a metallic 
lustre and translucent at the edges. Smaller masses of sapphire, 
sometimes in regular hexahedral prisms, are commonly imbedded in 
a massive rock of slightly yellowish gray hornblende, bearing some 
resemblance to anthophyllite. Wherever the sapphire occurs, there 
is a coating or bedding of carbonate of lime, the cellular surfaces of 
these masses of rock likewise present nests of spinelles of the same 
curious gray tint crystallized in perfect octahedrons, some of them 
measuring an inch on each surface of the plane, also occasionally as- 
sociated with hexahedral copper colored mica ; and now and then 
masses of large crystals of brown and yellowish brown idocrase, frag- 
ments of these crystals have occurred from three to four inches 10 
diameter, and prisms a span in length. Steatite is here a common 
ingredient, and has presented the pseudomorphous form of quartz, 
scapolite and spinelle. 
The octahedron or steatitive imitation of this last substance is of a 
pale straw white, and of rather rare occurrence. They project from 
cavities, and are not imbedded like those we formerly termed pseu- 
dolite, and which we found at Warwick. In the weathered cavities 
of the rocks the sapphire often presents a conchoidal appearance 
arising from the branching and connection of clusters of imper - 
prisms, sometimes having two or three sides of the regular prism vis- 
ible. These masses are not unfrequently imitated by the protean 
steatite which seems to mould itself to every form. 1 term this min- 
eral sapphire rather than corundum, from its beautiful and full color, 
though it is merely translucent and not transparent, but in this Loe 
it also varies considerably ; very seldom it is white or nearly colorless 
as well as gray and occasionally also of a blue, as dark as indigo a0 
the more so when imbedded in the feldspar, some masses have been 
found in this substance of the weight of two and a half pounds. —. 
tiguous to the same rock, though not so distinctly connected with it 
occur also masses of scapolite in four-sided prisms as large 85 # rr 
wrist, and straw colored Brucite, all of which as usual are concomrr 
tant withthe other minerals, and imbedded in the carbonate of lime- 
