Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/448

442 reddish, the stone is known as a sardonyx: large numbers of such stones are cut for setting in rings. The reddish tint of the sardonyx and of the carnelian may be readily developed artificially, and the process of "burning" by which this is effected was indeed known in Germany long before the methods of coloring onyxes were patent. It had often been observed that greyish-colored agates, after long exposure to sunshine, became reddened, and the effect of artificial heat in developing the color had likewise been accidentally observed. Experiments were tried in 1813, and since then the stones have been systematically burned whenever carnelians are required, as has indeed been practised for ages in the East. The German workmen expose the stones for several weeks to the heat of an oven, the temperature being at first very gentle, and then gradually raised. When all moisture has been thus expelled, the stones are moistened with sulphuric acid, and again exposed to heat, the temperature being this time slowly raised to redness. The reddened stone must of course be allowed to cool very gradually.

In 1845 an Idar manufacturer introduced a method of coloring stones bright blue; but - this process, unlike those previously described, produces an effect quite unknown among natural stones. Commonly, the agate is steeped first in solution of a ferric salt — a per-salt of iron — and then in ferrocyanide of potassium, or yellow prussiate of potash, whereby a precipitate of Prussian blue is thrown down in the pores of the stone. Other methods are employed, but these will suggest themselves to any chemist; in fact, almost any process yielding a blue precipitate may be applied.

About the year 1855 a green color was introduced, and chalcedony was thus tinted to resemble the natural chrysophrase. This color is produced by the use either of chromic acid or of a salt of nickel. Yellow is also a favorite tint among the Oberstein workers, and is commonly obtained by steeping the stones in hydrochloric acid. Of late years various fancy colors have likewise been employed, and even the aniline dyes have been pressed into the lapidary's service. Such tints are, however, fugitive, and are certainly to be eschewed as utterly unnatural, and therefore to most mineralogists little short of repulsive.

It is unnecessary to follow any of the minor branches of the agate industry, but in dismissing the subject let it not be forgotten that it is an industry which, in the neighborhood of Oberstein and Idar, gives employment to some three thousand hardworking and contented people.

 

 From The Examiner.

there ever a Griselda? The heroine Petrarch and Boccaccio found for after poets and the world, Chaucer's "flour of wifly pacience," remains with us lifelike too to-day; but is her character, with its sublime and ludicrous submission, its dignity and abjectness of utter obedience, its sedate approval of a lord and master's crimes, its strength and its servility, a possibility in the life of any age or people? No, answer experience, instinct, observation, induction, deduction, history, psychology — every form of reasoning and research. No, say the husbands emphatically. No, still more emphatically, say the wives. But other news has come from Polynesia. Griselda really existed there. At least the Rev. William Wyatt Gill says she did, and he is a missionary, and bound to keep his anecdotes truthful. Mr. Gill knew a man whose father knew her and all her family, including her husband. Mr. Gill does not call her Griselda; her name was Rao. And she did not entirely rival the Marquis of Saluzzo's wife, for her conjugal humility was not put to the test so long and so subtly. She had no children to give up to death as, like herself, their father's "own thing," and she was not called on to prepare her successor's wedding-feast. Her husband, being but an uneducated savage, merely took his own way with her, without any view to advancing her higher moral interests and teaching her to be a good wife; thus her womanly affections, her love and her jealousy, were not experimented upon, and her time of trial was short — an hour or two against Gricelda's twelve years of contented endurance. But if ever the spirit of Griselda inhabited mortal body it must have been in this woman.

Rao, the idolized daughter of Rongovei, became the wife of a famous warrior, Tupa, chief fighter of his clan. They were a well-assorted and happy couple, and their pride in each other was almost as great as their love. If no Rarotonran hero could boast such a tale of vanquished and eaten foes as Tupa, who had such skill in music and song as the beautiful 