The colors of the beryls grade from an almost colorless mineral (goshenite) though faintly green, with blue reflections, yellowish green of a peculiar oily liquidity (davidsonite), to honey yellows which form the so-called “golden beryls” of the trade, and which have a considerable value.  These stones have a hardness of 8, and when cut display much brilliancy.  Many assume the true aquamarine tints, and others seem to be almost identical with the “Diamond of the Rhine,” which as early as the end of the fifteenth century was used as a “fraudulent substitute for the true diamond” (King).  Few, very few, belong to the blue grades, and the best of these cannot compare with those from Royalston, Mass.  Those of amber and honey shades are beautiful objects, and under artificial light have a fascination far exceeding the olivine or chrysoberyl.  These are not as frequent as the paler varieties, but when found excite the admiration of visitor and expert.  It seems hardly probable that any true emeralds will be uncovered and the yellow beryls may not increase in number.  Their use in the arts will be improved by combining them with other stones and by preparing the larger specimens for single stone rings.

Very effective combinations of the aquamarine and blue species with the yellow may be recommended.  Tourmaline appears in some quantity, forming almost a schist at some points, but no specimens of any value have been extracted, the color being uniformly black.  The garnets are large trapezohedral-faced crystals of an intense color, but penetrated with rifts and flaws.  Many, no doubt, will afford serviceable gem material, but their resources have not yet been tested by the lapidary.

While granite considered as a building stone presents a complex of quartz, mica, and feldspar so confusedly intercrystallized as to make a homogeneous composite, in the present mass, like the larger and similar developments in North Carolina, these elements have excluded each other in their crystallization, and are found as three separate groups only sparingly intermingled.  The proportions of the constituent minerals which form granite, according to Prof.  Phillips, are twenty parts of potash feldspar (orthoclase), five parts of quartz, and two parts of potash mica (muscovite), and a survey of Mr. Wilson’s quarry exhibits these approximate relations with surprising force.

There can be but little doubt that this vein is a capital example of hydrothermal fusion, whereby in original gneissic strata, at a moderate temperature and considerable depth, through the action of contained water, with the physical accompaniment of plication, a solution of the country rock has been accomplished.  And the cooling and recrystallization has gone on so slowly that the elements of granite have preserved a physical isolation, while the associated silicates formed in the midst of this magma have attained a supremely close and compact texture, owing to the favorable conditions of slow growth giving them gem consistencies.  The further development of the vein may reveal interesting facts, and especially the following downward of the rock mass, which we suspect will contract into a narrower vein.  At present the order of crystallization and separation of the mineralogical units seems to have been feldspar, mica, garnet, beryl, quartz.