Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1902-09-20
JADE OF THE ANCIENTS
SPECIMENS OF THE PREHISTORIC
MINERAL FROM THE ORIENT.
Priceless Collection May Be Given by
Heber r. Bishop to Metro
politan Museum.
From the New York Mail and Express.

From the New York Mail and Express
Should Heber r. Bishop OF this city carry
out his reported intention Of giving his COL
lection of prehistoric oriental and New
Zealand jades to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art that institution would acquire a
unique assortment of treasures.
Mr.. Bishops collection not only Is the
best and most comprehensive of its kind,
but is likely to remain so, since the golden
time Of the gatherer Of Chinese jades is
past. The treasures Of the summer palace
were brought to the west by the French
and English in the sixties; the march on
Pekin two years ago brought forth little in
the way of new art works in the curious
old mineral. which some thirty years ago
gave rise to one of the most interesting
has ever carried on.
Jade Is mineral-a stone, the material
used by the neolithic man for his imple-
ments, as distinct from the flint Of the still
earlier paleolithic man. Flint was Clipped
into shape; jade was cut and polished with
sand and water. Often the water of
streams. rolling the pebbles Of the mineral
along sandy, rubbly river beds, performed
part of the laborious task for our early
ancestors. The shape of the find deter
mined it's use; but as often the block had to
be ground into hatchets and scrapers, avis
and needles, into ornamental beads, ham,
mers and battle axes.
OF Three Sorts.
This mineral has the useful quality of be-
ing exceedingly hard without being brittle.
Mineralogists know three kinds, to which
they have given the names Of nephrite,
jadeite and chloromelanite, the last of the
three being the most interesting, it has
never been found in the crude state as part
of the rock formation Of any of the CONT
hnr frny lyn IN
this day. We have it only in the form of
implements or of rough pieces of varying
size.
The Kuen-un mountains of China con-
tain the chief mines of jade today. Siberia,
too, yields an excellent quality of the min
eral, which has at present some vogue in
the form of fob seals and seal ring stones.
A peculiar kind is found in Polynesia, and
ceeded at last in discovering it in the rock
in Europe-''in situ, the mineralcgists
say, thus settling forever the great me
phrite question:
The Nephrite Question.
1t was late In the seventies, when the
discovery of thousands of small and large
jade implements in the remains Of the pre-
historic lake dwellings Of Switzerland had
drawn attention to this mineral, that Prof.
Fischer of Freiburg published his famous
book on the 'Nephrite Question" In this
he reasoned as follows: The builders of the
lake dwellings, the men of the later stone
age, used by preference jade in the max
ing Of their implements. Now jade is a
mineral that is not found in Europe in its
natural state, whence it follows that there
must have been in these prehistoric days
an intercontinental trade between central
Europe and China, which points to higher
state of civilization than we have been
willing to ascribe to the men of that era.
Up rose another Teutonc pundit, in the
person of DR.. Meyer, the curator of a mu-
scum in Dresden, who asserted that Prof.
Fischer's major premise had not been
proven. The Iberian peninsula and the
mountains of Norway, he said, have not
yet been thoroughly explored. Rather than
accept this theory of an intercontinental
prehistoric trade route, let wait until
the mineralogists chance upon the local
mines whence the paleolthic inhabitants
of Europe drew their raw material.