Cordylite-(Ce) with Albite, Aegirine
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An excellent, single, robust and shimmering Cordylite-(Ce) crystal graces this important piece from the Poudrette Quarry at Mont Saint Hilaire, Quebec, Canada. The crystal is textbook sharp and translucent. This rather exceptional and rather large, 6 mm, hexagonal crystal stands out on a fine druse of white Albite crystals for a remarkable - and unusual - contrast. Such pieces are legendary MSH rarities and I was told they were all collected by Gilles Haineault in the 1980s, and sold or traded to close friends of his. This ended up with my own mentors, Bill and Anne Cook of Cleveland area. It is not just a rarity in large size for the species, but a display quality rarity. The Cordylite-(Ce) crystal color changes in different lighting from a translucent brown-yellow to yellow-green and also shows small, pyramidal faces on the edge of the crystal all around. Other species on this small cabinet piece include beautiful 1 to 5 mm Smoky Quartz crystals, a dark stripe in the middle of the piece composed of felted aggregates of thin, black Aegirine crystals along with a couple of unidentified species. This piece looks fabulous with a hand lens or under a microscope but is also good to the normal eye. We have little to go by for pricing this, and only one comparable I have seen in recent years, which was a similarly sized crystal on similarly sized matrix: it sold for Bill Pinch before he passed away, and he told me it was offered at $10,000. I have seen nothing else in decades of this quality, except the two specimens referred to here.
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Mineral guide
Learn about Aegirine
, a sodium iron pyroxene, shows jet-to-olive prisms, sharp monoclinic crystals, and radiating clusters; prized by collectors for bold color and matrix.Regional guide
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