Download PDF by Diane Morgan: From Satan's Crown to the Holy Grail: Emeralds in Myth,

By Diane Morgan

ISBN-10: 0275991237

ISBN-13: 9780275991234

ISBN-10: 0313082154

ISBN-13: 9780313082153

Morgan discusses the beginning of the emerald, its abnormal constitution, and its unusual attract. the tale weaves throughout a number of continents and hundreds of thousands of years. it's a story of conquistadors, treachery, shipwrecks, and alchemy. alongside the best way, we meet scientists and kings and undergo witness because the nice emeralds are born, mined, smuggled, lower, and bought. The ebook additionally discusses the trendy artwork of creating man made emeralds. From the fastnesses of Afghanistan to the steamy jungles of Colombia and Zimbabwe, from the sands of Egypt to the sour Urals, this is often the tale of a stone whose unusual trip displays the yearnings, greed, passions, and eager for great thing about the human race.

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Extra resources for From Satan's Crown to the Holy Grail: Emeralds in Myth, Magic, and History

Sample text

This was wise of him; had he confined his work to Danish, it would have been years before anyone got around to reading it. The result of Steno’s work was the First Law of Crystallography, now called Steno’s law, elucidated in 1669. He hypothesized that minerals must have some kind of internal order, and while the science of his day did not allow him to see how atoms were arranged in the crystal, he could measure the angles between the faces, and this, he discovered, was critical. Steno’s law says the angle between any pair of crystal faces is always the same, and it is this constancy of angle, rather than the size of the crystal, that is characteristic of any particular mineral.

The poor man bargained the stone down to four staters, thinking he was doing his notoriously thrifty boss a favor, but alas, Ismenias took it the wrong way. He actually wanted the agent to buy the stone for its original selling price, so he could brag about how much he spent on it. He berated the poor fellow, telling him that he had seriously impaired the value of the stone by his hard bargaining. According to Pliny, Ismenias is said to have complained: “By Hercules! ” So from the very beginning, gemstone prices have caused no end of trouble.

The encapsulation of these ancient slimy beings sheds new light on how the emerald deposits formed. Tectonic movements of the earth allowed the emerald parent fluids to pour along fault planes across a Lower Cretaceous sedimentary bed in which the gastropod-bearing strata were buried. Fluids from the sedimentary formations dissolved the shells, leaving cavities in the rock where the emerald could crystallize. The shells underwent a complex process of dissociation–substitution shell by the emerald.

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From Satan's Crown to the Holy Grail: Emeralds in Myth, Magic, and History by Diane Morgan


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