V. The rubies of Burma and associated minerals: their mode of occurrence, origin, and metamorphoses. A contribution to the history of corundum

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Abstract
In the year 1798 Greville established and named the mineral species “corundum,” the crystallized oxide of aluminium; and in an appendix to Greville’s paper, read before this Society, the Count de Bournon correctly defined the crystallographic characters of the species. Four years later the last-mentioned author laid before the Royal Society his very valuable memoir, bearing the title, “Description of the Corundum Stone and its Varieties, commonly known by the names of Oriental Ruby, Sapphire, &c., with Observations on some other Mineral Substances.” In this work the mode of occurrence of corundum is discussed, and an admirable account is given of the minerals with which it is associated in the famous gem-yielding localities of Ceylon, China, and Southern India. In all of these districts de Bournon showed that the corundum occurs in crystalline schists; being associated in the Salem district of the Madras Presidency with moonstone, anorthite, fibrolite, diaspore, hornblende, quartz, mica, talc, garnet, zircon, and magnetite; while in Ceylon its chief associates are spinel, pyrrhotite, tourmaline, ceylanite (pleonast), and zircon. De Bournon’s memoir is especially noteworthy as containing the first descriptions of two very important rock-forming minerals—anorthite (“indianite”) and sillimanite (“fibrolite”). Nearly twenty years later, Leschenault de la Tour was sent by the authorities of the Natural-History Museum of Paris on a scientific mission to the Salem district in Southern India, and an account of his observations—botanical, zoological, and geological—appeared in the official publications of the Museum. Leschenault’s collections are preserved in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, and those of the Count de Bournon in the Collège de France, and both these collections have been made the object of a series of careful and exact studies by the able mineralogist and petrographer M. Alfred Lacroix.

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