BERZELIANITE with Calcite

$2,500.00

$40.00 shipping
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Tucson, Arizona, USA

7,543 for sale·132 sold

This is a wonderful historic rarity heralding from Lerbach in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, in the Harz mountains, Lower Saxony, Germany. It is dark grey metallic Berzelianite, a copper selenide which before being named in 1850, was called Selenkupferblei. This old name is recorded on a wonderful historic handwritten label which accompanies it. Berzelianite almost never forms discrete crystals, and so the well-formed rhombic crystals seen on the surface are Calcite. However, underneath and between these, Berzelianite occurs as dark grey rounded crystals and as veinlets within matrix. Berzelianite is not specifically recorded as from Lerbach on online databases, but the famous selenide-bearing mines of Charlotte and St. Lorenz are only a few miles away. It is from the superb systematic collection assembled by the brothers Martin and Michael Günther (1951-2007 & 1956-2021). A wonderful old-time German specimen, with a super mid- to late-19th century label.