The Onyx Quarries.

Manawatu Herald, 20 March 1894, Page 3

The Onyx Quarries.

These quarries, which in lack of a better title, are known as the O'Neill onyx quarries, constitute one of the most remarkable geological displays to be found in Arigona. The quarries are qnito extensive, covering a regular-shaped area of about two hundred acres, and are supposed to have been formed by the action ot volcanic springs. To the casual observer the brown and weather-beaten surface of the unbroken strata presents anything but an interesting aspect. Once though, the surface is broken, one readily realizes how the stone, on account of its beauty and peculiarities, was given a sacred character by a people (the Aztec3), unacquainted with the mysteries of glass making or glass coloring, for in it almost every color known to man can be found. Such is its,translucenay and so pronounced and yet, so delicately blended its co'ors, that cut into slabs an inch in thickness and held in the- sunlight the stone preseuts all the rich tints of stained glass windows, whi'e over its surface are pictured the most quaint and grotesque figured aud images— landscapes like miniature mirages, faces und forms of men and beasts, outlines of buildings and mountains — so distinctly lined that it requires an effort to believe that Nature is the only arti3t that had a hand in its creation. No matter how the rock may be broken or cut, there is always exposed such a multiplicity ot forms and oiv lines that it must have been a dull priest, indeed, who in thus using it in divination could not find a prophecy satisfactory to the most capricious. The scone, v/hile it is identical in every respect with the Mexican onyx which once made the now exhausted quarries of that country famous, unlike the Mexican stone, is not fragmentary and broken intobouldei'B but lies in regular layer!", so that slabs of almost any size can be quarried — the largest slab of onyx ever polished having been taken from the quarry. The only attempt made to~ place" tile' stone before the public hems by the manufacture of trinkets of jewelry by the inmates of the Territorial Penitentiary at Yuma, to whom at their own request the oynx is issued by the authorities in liou of tobacco as a reward for good behavior.