Gem Show Report Confirms $45 'Rare Quartz' Purchase After 'Strictly Educational' Outing

A specimen sold at Saturday's regional gem and mineral show as Rare Quartz (Natural) was purchased for $45 by a member of the club's Tuesday field group, whose stated purpose for attending the show was educational.

The specimen weighs 310 grams. It takes a scratch from glass and fails to scratch a steel knife, placing it at hardness 7 on the Mohs scale. It leaves a white streak on an unglazed porcelain plate. Measured by water displacement in a 100 mL graduated cylinder, its specific gravity is 2.65, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 0.02 on the last reading, taken when the specimen rested against the cylinder wall. Method, unit, and uncertainty are recorded. The specimen is quartz.

Quartz is not rare. This is not a controversy; it is the mineral that the rest of the mineral collection is stored beside.

The vendor's card gave a locality of South America. A continent is not a locality. The Tuesday field group has a standing rule about this, drafted by Otis Vale after a 2023 disagreement involving a banded iron formation, and the rule holds that a provenance line naming a continent is to be read as a provenance line admitting it does not have one.

The purchase has nonetheless been defended on procedural grounds. Mr. Vale, asked at Tuesday's meeting whether the outing had violated the group's custom of educational trips, issued a ruling from the chair that has since been quoted three times in the club's message thread: "Educational describes the person going in. Nobody has ever been uneducated at the register."

Inez Fenn, who keeps the monthly update, has added a column. Her figures, as corrected last week, stand at seven outings declared strictly educational and six of those ending in a purchase. She notes, in the margin of her own spreadsheet, that the original count omitted a September trip and that the percentage therefore improved for the wrong reason.

Recalculating the denominator myself, I find the corrected figure is 6/7, or 86 percent, and that no meaningful uncertainty can be attached to it because the sample is the club's own behavior rather than a random one. The honest statement is that most of these outings end at a register, that the exception was a cold morning in a drainage ditch, and that a single outing could move the figure by fourteen points either way.

At the household where the specimen now lives, the receipt has been folded into the box with the stone, which suggests the buyer intends both to keep it and to be able to prove, later, what it cost. Harold Loomis, who shares the house, reports having asked what rare means on a card and being told the question was not helpful to the evening. He has since stopped asking and has become, without applying for the position, the person who tells visitors that it is quartz.

What the $45 bought is not entirely clear from the measurements. The stone is ordinary, the label overstates it, and the locality is a continent. What the $45 also bought is the account of the day, which is why the receipt is in the box rather than the bin. The purchase remains classified as educational, cost basis $45, with the uncertainty stated cleanly: it cannot be reduced without a second outing, and a second outing has already been put on the calendar for the first weekend in October.