show and tell

[Maltisau]

Nice work LGH,

You will have that jar filled in no time.

I went out for a look yesterday and found a nice green gem and some blue ones along with the usual gold. I'll see if I can get some pictures up for you to look at

 

[Lefty]

Nice little haul there LGH Nice little quartz crystals too.

As to the mystery striped slab of stone, agate and the crystals you found are made of the same material - quartz - and are roughly the same hardness. If the stone is fluorite, the point of one of your quartz crystals should scratch it easily without anything happening to the crystal. There is a simple hardness scale called Moh's scale that runs from 1 (softest - like talc) to 10 (hardest, diamond). If I recall correctly, quartz is 7 on Moh's scale while fluorite is only about 4. So quartz is quite a lot harder than fluorite.

As Kingsolomon says, the scratch test is a bit crude but if that's all you have then it may give you at least a clue. It helped me determine that a stone I had found and suspected to be a sapphire actually was a sapphire (I don't have much luck with things like specific gravity tests and don't own a refractometer). The stone scratched a garnet (7.5) and a topaz (8) easily. I was able to scratch a bomby sapphire with it but only with a fair bit of force and the two stones scratched each other. It wasn't until later that I saw that it was green in one direction but blue in another (there was some rubbishy grey stone hiding the blue axis) - I don't know of too many things that are green one direction, blue in the other and hard enough to scratch another stone that you know is a sapphire