Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1881 — How Quartz is Formed. [ARTICLE]

How Quartz is Formed.

We have been handed a piece of rock that bore a remarkable resemblance to quartz that had been partially decomposed and its solid parts stained by the oxidization of minerals. It was taken from between the tubes of an old boiler that was being repaired at Lakenan’s foundry. The boiler has been in use for some years at quartz mines in this district, and the rock was the result of the accretions or precipitation of the steam that permeated or escaped from the tubes, and in the course of years hardened into a stone some three inches in thickness. To all appearances it was a quartz formation, and would be so pronounced by any miner of experience. The process by which the stone was formed would be a strong proof of the theory that quartz veins are of aqueous formation, and that the forces may be still actively at work in Nature’s laboratory creating the fissures and filling them with the deposits of a distinctive mineral character that come from the waters and the so-called “ country-rock.” —Grass Valley (Cal.) Tidings.