Mineral specimen mortality

SO MUCH IS THROWN AWAY

Bottley's, the famous old English dealer, was moving to a new warehouse, and in the old warehouse he discovered a number of tea crates full of calcites and barites that had been there for many years. Rather than try to make room for them in his new facility he had them carted down to the Thames River and thrown in.

Specimens need not be totally pulverized to be destroyed. They simply need to be damaged enough to lose their value or their interest to their owner. Then what happens?

The cruel fact is that most mineral specimens are just thrown away. All specimen dealers from time to time speculate about what happens to all of the specimens that a particular locality produced. What ever happened to all those good calcite, galena and sphalerite specimens that the tri-state (Oklahoma-Kansas-Missouri) lead district produced? There were hundreds, probably thousands, of tons of specimens produced over more than the fifty years that the district was heavily mined. Boodle Lane, well known tri-state dealer, used to send barrels of specimens all over the world. The same was true about adamite and hemimorphite specimens that flooded out of Mexico and fluorite specimens from Cave-in-Rock, Illinois. There were tons of them. Where did they go? More recently there has been a flood of Indian zeolite and related specimens. Also amethysts from Brazil (at least a thousand tons per year) and pyrite from Peru. Over 100,000 specimens of San Francisco mine (Mexico) wulfenite were mined, shipped and sold. Thousands of tons of specimens. Where did they go? In the last century it was pyrites from Elba, sulfur specimens from Sicily and barites, calcites and specular hematite specimens from England.

Odds are, 99% of those specimens have by now been discarded. Most of the specimens that are sold are sold to non-collectors who are fascinated enough by minerals to buy some "samples" to keep around the house. Over the years they get dusty and dirty, their color fades, their luster dims, the kids play with them, and then they get damaged as well as dusty, dirty, faded and dull. Finally someone just throws the dirty old rocks out in the garden or trash. Those environmentally sensitive folk among you can perhaps take solace that, in a sense, the specimens, like ourselves, are recycled. From dust, to dust.

THE BULLDOZER OF DOOM

Dr. James Wishart of Rochester, New York, spent a lifetime building a fine collection. During his eighties his family talked him into joining a retirement community and offered to do all the work of helping him move and dispose of unwanted possessions; these definitely did not include the mineral collection. His home was sold to a developer and during escrow the contents of the house were removed one way or another. The day before the closing of escrow the last load was to be removed from the property, which was supposed to include the mineral collection. It had been removed from the cabinets, packed in boxes and placed in the driveway with trash and other items. For some reason the specimens were left behind and their absence was not noticed until late that evening. Dr. Wishart returned the following day to get the specimens and, upon arriving at the site of the home, found that the property had been leveled to make way for a new shopping center. The family speculates that the specimens were bulldozed along with the rest of the house and they were never recovered. The collection contained many important specimens including apparently the largest gold nugget ever found in New York state.