Abstract
On Saturday, December 21, the Anderson Galleries, of New York City, disposed by auction of a collection of minerals, numbering about 2,000 specimens, made by the late Thomas E. H. Curtis, of Plainfield, N. J. Mr. George S. Scott has kindly sent us the following account of this sale: “The collection was a large assortment of miscellaneous stuff, gathered in a haphazard manner, and in the whole collection there were probably less than one hundred specimens that were worth while. There may have been a couple of hundred more that were interesting. There were thirty or more bidders at the sale. If there had been sixty, the Curtis sale might have gone into history as the most successful sale of mineral specimens of the age. The bidding was robust, whether the specimen was good, fairly so or poor. Some claimed to have secured bargains, but there were very few bargains indeed in the better grade specimens, as the bidding on these got almost beyond control. The best purchase of the collection was a beautiful pyromorphite from Ems, bought by Mr. Whitlock for the American Museum of Natural History. Another worthwhile specimen was a pyrargyrite from Guanajuato, which was bought by Mr. English. A rhodochrosite and proustite represented item 331, on the Catalog list, as two vanadinites (from nowhere). The rhodochrosite was one of the Colorado kind, with large showy rhombohedrons. The proustite was a gem, a beautiful transparent crystal from Chili. The writer purchased these, also a stolzite from Broken Hill. The most active bidding of the sale was on some showy chalcotrichites, which brought double their actual specimen value. The following well-known mineralogists took part in the sale: F. J. Allen, G. E. Ashby, E. C. Dean, W. H. Broadwell, G. L. English, H. F. Gardner, J. C. Grenzi, C. W. Hoadley, J. Holzmann, O. T. Lee, W. G. Levison, J. G. Manchester, E. A. Maynard, E. Sampson, G. S. Scott, G. S. Stanton, J. Ulrich, J. P. Wintringham, and H. J. Young.”
