A Ruby-rock.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20455, 7 November 1934, Page 8

A Ruby-rock.

Nature Notes

By James Drummond, F.L.S., F'.Z.S. a ruby-rock, is not so well known as Mr William Goodlett. of Dunedin, whose name it bears. In his younger days he was part and parcel of Otago University. Former students always will remember him for his genial and obliging disposition, which, like wisdom, is more precious than rubies. The rubv-rock is composed of a lustrous green matrix. Embedded in it and contrasting with its brilliant colour there are many small dark-red rubies. Specimens tested at Otago University by Professor G. IT. F. Ulrich were found to contain oriental rubies of fine colour. Three sorts of rubies are known, the oriental, the balas and the spinel. ?\n expert on gems places the oriental rtiby as the only true ruby, ranking first for beauty amongst coloured stones. “If its colour is good quality,” this authority wrote, “it has the vivid tint of arterial blood, or of the very centre of the red ray in the solar spectrum. After the diamond and the sapphire, it is the hardest precious stone. A perfect ruby is the rarest production of Nature.” Mr P. G. Morgan, a former Director of the New Zealand Geological Survey, a department that has done remarkably good work for many years, reported that most of the goodletite rubies examined are not sufficiently transparent to be called gem stones, but that a few showed promise of being valuable to jewellers. This ruby-rock is very rare. It has been found only in the form of loose boulders in the gold-bearing drifts of Rimu, Kanieri and Kanieri Forks, on the West Coast, and in Whitcombe Valley through which the Whitcombe Pass crosses the Southern Alps. It was concluded that the ruby-rock came from the watershed of the Hokitika River, the source of most of the boulders in the Rimu drifts. For twenty years the Geological Survey made many efforts in that direction to discover the rubv-bearing rock in position, withoxit success. A prospecting party was reported to have found boulders of the rock in the Whitcombe Valley. Rivergravels of the Whitcombe River and of its tributary, the Cropp, were searched thoroughly and repeated panning tests were made, but there were no signs there of rubies or of ruby-rock.