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GARNETS.
43

From spinels the passage to garnets is easy. But it is not really difficult to discriminate between the two species, even when the colours seem the same. If you have a ruby, a spinel, and a garnet together, the first will scratch the second and the second the third. The ruby will show two colours in the dichroiscope, the spinel and the garnet only one. The spinel will exhibit no black bands like those belonging to the almandine garnet, when viewed with the spectroscope. And there is a blackness, due to much absorption of light, in many of the facets of a garnet, as seen from the "table" of the stone, which will not be observed in the spinel. The garnet, unless of remarkable size or quality, will hardly be deemed worthy of being mounted in the same costly way as the ruby or the red spinel, but it may be said that the same general treatment suits all these red stones. Yet there are two ways in which garnets have for long and in many places been treated, to which I may legitimately refer here. The plates of garnet so largely found in Anglo-Saxon and Celtic jewels have remained, in the majority of cases, intact to the present day. They afford, in their breadths of soft rich colour, a pleasing contrast to the minute filigree, granulated and enamel work with which they are generally associated. The other employment of the red garnet (and it may be traced back to a far earlier date than that just cited) is as a carbuncle—not necessarily foiled at the back. Cut en cabochon, slightly hollowed behind, and laid on a plain gold surface, the light, as of a glowing coal, quivers in the midst of a good stone. There is a lovely disc of antique gold set with five carbuncles in the Gold Ornaments room at the British Museum. In the centre is a round carbuncle boss; then four long pointed arms, much like elongated pears, radiate from this centre, alternately with a somewhat similar series of repoussé arms, beaten up from the disc of gold, and bordered with knurled wires onlaid. There is not much work in the piece; the intrinsic value of gold and garnets is quite small, but the effect is delightful; simple, yet rich; solid, yet elegant. Can the same