Abstract
THE Trustees have purchased for the Department of Mineralogy uncut crystals of topaz, sapphire, and a set of seven rough crystals of ruby from Mogok, while cut stones are represented by a good example of deep lilac-coloured kunzite and a remarkable clear yellow cassiterite, cut from a stone from Uganda. A small diamond of considerable interest in the history of diamond-mining has been presented by Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. It is the first diamond taken from the first of the Kimberley diamond mines—the Jagers-fontein—and was found by William Wreford Paddon. Dr. Stanley Smith, University of Bristol, has presented a specimen of natural coke showing columnar structure, from a quarry near Cockfield, County Durham. The coke was formed where a coal seam had been burnt out by a basalt dyke. Miss Beatrice O. Corfe has presented to the Department of Botany more than three hundred paintings of British flowers. The Department already possesses a number of Miss Corfe's paintings which were purchased some years ago. The paintings are artistic and at the same time botanically sound, and a number of them suitably adapted have been reproduced in the Museum series of botanical picture postcards. As a result of a short expedition to St. Lucia undertaken for the Museum by Mr. Harold E. Box, more than three hundred flowering plants and ferns were obtained chiefly from the higher altitudes of the mountains in the interior of the island. Unfortunately, Mr. Box's visit coincided with the almost unprecedented rainfall of November last, and twenty out of twenty-eight days had to be spent in camp or indoors.
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British Museum (Natural History): Recent Acquisitions. Nature 143, 195 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143195b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143195b0