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October has a way of making people notice the stranger corners of the natural world, and mineralogy has more genuinely

Ask a collector to name a great quartz locality and you’ll usually hear Arkansas, Brazil, or the Alps. Chihuahua, Mexico’s

Specimen listings use the phrase constantly: “quartz on matrix,” “druzy on matrix,” “mineral specimen on matrix.” It’s easy to skim

Most crystal shapes are what you’d predict from a mineral’s internal structure, straightforward geometry repeated outward in a single, consistent

Run a light across a druzy specimen and the whole surface flickers, hundreds of tiny facets catching and throwing back

Quartz has picked up a lot of claims about the kind of energy it supposedly holds. It also has one

Put a quartz point, a quartz cluster, and a piece of druzy quartz side by side and they can look

Most specimens on a shelf are a single mineral through and through. Every so often, though, a piece shows two

Long Island doesn’t have petrified forests. It doesn’t have the kind of bedrock that produces them either, most of the

Some quartz crystals carry a faint, cloudy outline of a smaller crystal suspended inside them, like a shadow trapped in