Submetallic

It is dark gray to black in color with a metallic to submetallic luster and a high specific gravity.

The rutile crystals are sharp, dark reddish brown, and blocky to thick-tabular, with good submetallic luster, and reach 4 cm; they rest lightly in pale gray-brown matrix of what appears to be rhyolite.

This scheelite is brown to almost black, with submetallic luster; the crystals perch delicately among bright clusters of "needle" quartz crystals (with a few Japan-law twins), in striking, pincushiony-looking specimens measuring between 4 and 10 cm.

Then there are the Melansons' newly collected specimens of ilmenite from a carbonatite outcrop on the property of the old Faraday mine (later called the Madawaska mine) in Ontario: slightly rough, thick-tabular, submetallic black crystals to 4 cm in pinkish calcite matrix.

Anatase has been identified in sill cavities as tan, powdery coatings, and as gray, submetallic, flaky aggregates associated with siderite and ilmenorutile.

On weathering, it appears brown, with a submetallic luster.

This past July, while Martin Jensen was scouting around in China for Collector's Edge, a dealer in Changsha showed him a few dozen specimens of a then-unidentified, submetallic black mineral which had just been found in the great Yaogangxian tungsten mine in Hunan Province.

The sharp, black prismatic crystals reach 6 cm; all possess a decent submetallic luster, and a very few are doubly terminated.

In September 2002, about 200 small specimens (from 2.5 to 5 cm) of ferrocolumbite were taken from the Tsaramanga pegmatite, between Betafo and Antsirabe: these are black, very sharp, wedge-terminated crystals with submetallic luster, in clean parallel-growth groups without matrix, the individual crystal size averaging around 2 cm.

The last major portion of the book consists of two tables, one for minerals with metallic or submetallic luster and one for the non-metallics.

Physical, chemical and crystallographic properties: Luster: submetallic. Diaphaneity: opaque, Color: coal black.

Fibrous, submetallic black pyrolusite was reported from the Butte district by both Weed (1912) and Pardee (1918).