Fluorescent Pectolite & Prehnite - Parker Shaft, Franklin, NJ

Prehnite or "Pectolprehnite": FL indescribable colors SW!!
Pectolite: FL Orange SW
Manganaxinite: FL Red SW
Calcite {CaCO₃}: FL Red-Orange SW
Margarosanite: FL Blue-White SW
Willemite: FL Green SW

Prehnite and pectolite were part of the so-called "Parker suite" of minerals, along with margarosanite, manganaxinite, xonotlite, roeblingite, nasonite, charlesite, datolite, and a few others. Prehnite and pectolite from Franklin sometimes occur as an inseparable mixture. The crystal grains of each mineral are so closely intergrown that they look like one mineral. This is why some collectors use the term "pecto-prehnite" or "pectolprehnite", even though that's not a real species name.

Minerals like these can have a special quality... a person starts feeling the need to be close to them, to have them nearby all the time. One doesn't feel quite right when the minerals are not around. This is especially true of Parker suite minerals. Some collectors become addicted to them. I fear this might be starting to happen to me. I try to resist. Lately it isn't working.

They must be powerful, these rocks. It's not just the fluorescence, either. Back in 1899 there were people mysteriously drawn to roeblingite before they even knew it fluoresced! Think about this. Was Baron Karl von Reichenbach correct about a mysterious energy from minerals? Few may believe his theories nowadays, but I think he was really on to something.

Few things can do this to a person, where you look at them and immediately you think to yourself, "I need that." Imagine. It's a rock, but you need it! Who could have prepared you for this? The Parker Shaft minerals in particular can affect a person this way. If the people who ran things were thinking straight, they'd dig up those minerals. They'd re-open those flooded mines. Forget gold. Gold is a waste of time-- it's just one element, it comes in only one color, and it doesn't even fluoresce! Franklin minerals on the other hand, now those are worth having!

Unfortunately there's the problem of all those troublesome buildings now sitting on Franklin. What were people thinking, building on top of the place? Especially the rock dumps. Destroying the rock dumps was just wrong. In the grand scheme of things, a pile of Parker Shaft mine rock should rank in importance leagues above parking lots, houses, and stores.

Countless tons of Parker minerals also lie buried in flooded and collapsed mine stopes, because at the time it was too expensive to haul them up to the surface. The mining company regarded them as worthless, since they weren't actually zinc ores.

Anyway, since you're still reading after my little digression... let's get back to the rock itself. This was a very difficult specimen to photograph. Even though the photo is a little overexposed (making the fluorescence appear brighter), the specimen still looks better in real life. With some prolonged tweaking of the hue, saturation, lightness, etc., I was able to make the photo a fair representation of the real-life fluorescent colors. However, the true fluorescence of the pectolite-prehnite in the specimen is still a bit more "peach" colored than tan, but it's tough to capture with a camera. The prehnite-pectolite mixture has a very subtle fluorescence whose exact color is hard to describe. The human eye can see it just fine in real life, but the camera fails to capture it adequately. I'd call it a mixture of peach, tan, and pale bluish. In some specimens the response is more bluish.

Franklin minerals can fluoresce colors that don't even exist... for example, pink-blue.

The non-fluorescent minerals in the specimen (with daylight colors in parentheses) include hancockite (brick-red), andradite (caramel-colored garnet), franklinite (black, sub-metallic), hendricksite (purplish-black mica), and possibly ganophyllite (tan). Some collectors call this complex mineral assemblage "Parker Shaft soup" because there are so many species in it.

I bought this piece from another collector recently. I saw it, and there it was: I needed it.