Geology 4 Geologist

  Do rocks and minerals control our destiny? One day in October 1820 two younger men, Elijah Hamlin and Ezekiel Holmes, were trekking on a hill in Maine called Mount Mica after they spotted a glowing, inexperienced stone on the ground. They picked it up and started to search for others, but darkness turned into falling. The next day it snowed. When they in the end came back, inside the spring, they located the hill affected by such stones, on the grounds that identified it as tourmaline, a semiprecious gem prized for its range of colours. Words unfold. In 1879 a gentleman geologist and man-about-the-world named George Kunz visited. He gave some pieces to a businessman named Charles Tiffany, who hired him on the spot. One of Tiffany’s board participants changed into JP Morgan, the banker and robber baron, who started out buying tourmaline and other jewels through Kunz. Much of that series wound up inside the American Museum of Natural History.    I made the acquaintance of Morgan’s tour