gems, corundum, history.1, Sri Lanka.12, spinel, Ceylon

In a Memoir on corundum, which I gave to the Royal Society of London, and which was printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the year 1802, after having fulfilled the purpose I had set for myself, which was to make this substance more perfectly known than it had been until then, while at the same time determining its intimate relationship with all the stones designated by jewelers under the epithet oriental," such as the oriental ruby, the oriental topaz, the oriental amethyst, the sapphire, etc., I took advantage of this circumstance to insert various details on other substances, and more particularly on spinel. Mr. White, an officer in the English army, whom, upon his departure for the island of Ceylon, I had very earnestly recommended to procure for us some stones from that island, had sent us, in the midst of an otherwise rather insignificant shipment, two rock fragments which showed me, for the first time, spinel from Ceylon not originating from the river sands of that island, but enclosed within a rock that served as its matrix. This first observation goes back more than 20 years; and since that time, nothing has come to increase the sum of our earlier knowledge in this regard, nor concerning the corundum of the Indian peninsula, nor that—more interesting on account of its transparency and purity—of the island of Ceylon."