ARTIFICIAL PRECIOUS STONES.
WE wonder if Mr. Charles Bryant, whom we assume to the well-known mineralogist and jeweller, is quite- as confident as in his letter, published in Monday's Standard, he proclaims himself to be. However sincere he may wish to• be, we should doubt it a little. It was recently announced,. as most of our readers will have seen, that Mr. Greville- Williams had actually made real emeralds out of the refuse- of a gas retort, and could, if he thought it worth while, make other gems—not imitations, be it understood, but the real article—with all the qualities by which experts usually test the genuineness of precious stones. That was rather a shock to the buyers of emeralds, and accordingly Mr. Bryant steps- forward to say that the process costs a great deal more than a stone purchased from a jeweller would, and that experiments. of the kind have during the greater part of this century been occasionally successful. As long ago as 1837, Gaudin the chemist produced artificial rubies ; sapphires have been made repeatedly; the spinel ruby has been evolved in such per- fection as to deceive the most experienced buyers ; while even. diamonds have been manufactured—if that is the right word— though in sizes too small to be of any practical value in com- merce. Nevertheless, the market for precious stones has never been affected, and it will not be, Mr. Bryant thinks, by Mr. Greville Williams's very interesting experiments. That is true, and will doubtless be comforting to jewel-owners ; but, as Mr. Bryant is much too clever a man not to perceive, it does. not quite cover the whole case. Mr. Williams may not have solved the great problem, which is, of course, to produce precious stones by artificial means at a profitable rate; but surely every successful experiment is a step forward towards the realisation of the ideal ? The usual coarse of inventions is for the man of science to discover a method, for the prac- tical chemist or mechanician to apply it, and for the trader by gradual pressure to secure any needful reductions in the- cost; and we do not know any reason why precious stones- should escape the law which is at this moment, if we may believe prospectuses, operating in the case of the rarer metals, such as osmium. With all respect for Mr. Bryant, we should say, judging merely as outside observers, that the danger to jewel-- owners, though not pressing, was both real and considerable, and that a bad quarter of an hour was for them quite within, the limits of possibility. They may suffer as landlords have done, and will probably make more fuss. They have rather a serious stake in the matter, too. No one, not even Mr. Bryant, would venture to offer a serious estimate of the value of all the precious stones in Europe and America— we purposely exclude the enormous quantities scattered over Asia, the " buckets of jewels," for instance, known to be- in the possession of the Shah—but guessing by the light of the diamond statistics, a hundred millions sterling would be far too low a figure to assume. That is a large mass of property, and a great chemist who happened to understand mineralogy, and devoted himself for a few years to the manu- facture of precious stones, might some fine morning run its. value down to a quite unexpected degree. He would try, we- dare say, to keep his processes secret, and would avail himself of the Patent Laws ; but this is the nineteenth century, nothing- remains secret long, patents do not last for ever, and the cost even of a premature panic in the jewel market would be- represented by millions. We may be told that such a discovery- is impossible, even by an Edison of mineralogy ; but we should.. like to know more precisely why. The constituents of every precious stone are perfectly well known, and are all obtainable ; and the writer in the Standard who points to the difficulty of ascertaining the exact proportions in which such constituents should be used, underrates the patience of scientific analysts... If they were at work on the subject with a great object., and with the sort of passion with which electricians an mechanicians are now working to overcome the last difficulties in the way of the electric motor, they would find the right formulas soon enough. Mr. Williams has found them,. according to the Standard, for making emeralds, and there- is nothing to make the manufacture of emeralds more easy
than that of other stones. The only active agency wanted is transcendent heat, and the chemists and electricians between them are now, we fancy, in full possession of the means of producing that. We bow to experts at all times on their own subjects, but it is not clear to the lay mind why, as jewels are already made, they should not be made in quantities, or why the processes should be so enormously costly as they are invariably, and to our minds rather too eagerly, represented to be. Wherein lies this element of in- ordinate cost, if the process is once so well known that ordi- nary manufacturing chemists can venture to attempt it P We are inclined to think that the great obstacle is not that, but the idea that the manufacture of any precious stone must be useless, because if once it could be manufactured readily, its value would disappear. Nobody, it is supposed, would want made emeralds, any more than they would want those often really wonderful imitations which sometimes perplex even experienced jewellers. Now, is that fancy quite well founded P The question is a curious one, for it involves a good deal of human nature. Is the value of a precious stone wholly depen- dent upon its rarity, and the consequent proof it affords that its owner is possessed of unusual wealth, or, at all events, of wealth which he can afford to waste P That is a nearly universal assumption, especially with those to whom wealth is in itself an offence, and it has this support at least, that many a woman who would despise pretence thinks, if she actually has the diamonds at her bankers', she may wear their copies in paste. We venture, nevertheless, to question its entire correct- ness. The enormous market price of precious stones, as com- pared with their bulk and utility, is no doubt due to their rarity, and the consequent gratification to vanity which their possession affords; but their whole value does not consist in that. The desire for them is provoked also by their inherent beauty, as of flowers gifted with an attribute of permanence, and possibly also by that instinctive taste for shining things which has made dewdrops strike all races as exquisitely beautiful—nobody ever paid for a dewdrop—and which, as many doctors know, rises in some men and women to a well-marked kind of insanity. Many kleptomaniacs can control themselves against their temptation so long as the coveted article does not glitter. No possible ease of manufacture can make an eternal dewdrop other than beautiful, or take away the ruby's gift of setting- off flesh, or dim the strange flash of the opal, so utterly unlike anything else that Nature has produced. [By-the- way, the reference to the opal may be a mistake, for the beauty of that jewel, being the result of Nature's failure and not of her success—for she can hardly have intended those hiatuses which yield the iridescence —may be wholly beyond even the ablest chemist's art.] The taste for jewels would be universal, if only the people ever thought of them as possibly procurable ; and if they sank heavily in price, they would be universally worn, as, indeed, the cheaper jewels and the imitations are already. What would happen, we believe, therefore, if jewels became cheap, is that the rich would abandon them in their present form, which tends more and more to a costly simplicity—the stones being, as it were, bared of all other ornament—and that whole populations would take them up, thus constituting them once more a great article of commerce. Every woman above the poorest would use the stones for ornament. It is Birmingham jewellery that would die, not the real article. The rich, moreover, would defend themselves by calling art to their aid, and we should see not only a wonderful improvement in goldsmiths' work, now often devoid of even a pretence of art feeling, but a sudden and splendid revival of the art of the gem engraver, now so nearly dead. The ruby collar of the Marchioness would be almost as costly as ever, as a triumph of design and workmanship— even Socialists could hardly make the first designer in Europe use his gift with a willing heart for a pound a week— while diamonds would become with the women of the people what pearls used to be in some parts of Italy, ornaments with which it was almost indecorous, certainly quite bad form, on high occasions to dispense. The jewel trade would be destroyed as it is, and all jewel-owners would feel as if they had bought Irish land or the bonds of a repudiating State; but there would be a new jewel trade embracing entire populations. Plain people would be too wise for such folly P That is not quite so certain. Plain people now are very like the select people of a century ago, and it is the
picked " classes " of earth, the first in wealth and taste and the means of enjoyment, who in all ages have admired the flash apparently so self-derived, though it is as much a reflection as if it came from a mirror, that makes the first beauty of precious stones. We do not believe that the enlightenment of mankind will alter the taste for them much—it has certainly not done it yet,—nor do we see why, when the Smith of to-morrow has been raised to the level of De Vere of to-day—a consummation still some way off —Smith's tastes and De Vere's should be so utterly unlike. The jewel trade will not die ; but we do not feel quite so certain as Mr. Bryant apparently does, that it may not be totally transformed, to the pecuniary injury of present holders. Fortunately, if science should produce such a catastrophe— and science, though usually favourable to the capitalist, is not invariably so—the area of ruin and misery would be compara- tively limited. Dealers now rich would be pauperised; but the mass of those who possess precious stones would lose only potential wealth. Their gems produce no interest, and if destroyed in value, would still in one way remain as valuable as they are now. They are only gold in the mine so long as they are locked up.
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