T  Monus, age 13, of Bridgeport, Conn

What is azurwrite

Sometimes the history of a word gives us a warm and intimate glimpse of past history  This is true of the worn azure, which came into our language at the time of the crusades  It was borrowed from an older Arab word meaning blue and used by the knights and their colorful trains when they traveled across Europe with high hopes of capturing the Holy Land  Each knight traveled with bright banners and a shield emblazoned with his own emblems  Most of them came from northern Europe where  skies are often  grey and you, can imagine the uplift they felt they saw for the first time the heavenly blue sky  off  the Mediterranean 

Perhaps this warm, dazzling blue gave a new meaning to one of the favorite colors in their heraldry At any rate they borrowed and slightly changed a word from the enemy  Arabs to describe it  In heraldry, the term azure field is still used to describe the blue background of an emblem 

The word is still, used, in a‑rather various blues of a clear sky  It is also the root word of lazarite, lapis  lazuli and; azurite, rocky minerals which look like they might have dropped down, to earth from  the cloudless heavan 

Lapis lazuli, is a  rich color of the mineral la  zupite, and  in a way  related to azurite as a mineral, Lazurite is a ; phosphate  mineral, a, compound of  phosphorous, and Iron or, magnesium,  Azurite is: carbonate, mineral,  a compound of  carbon and copper.  Lazurite has a silky  shine;  it is harder, more translucent and  refuses to dissolve: in acid  Azurite dissolves with a cloud of bubbles in  a , solution of  hydrochloric acid.

In nature the pale and deep blues of lazurite are  usually banded, with vivid greens and this semi precious stone rivals  the peacock tail. Azurite is always blue, from the pale misty blue of the distant horizon, through the bright blues of high noon to the dark velvety blue of a starry midnight  However, it is often found mixed with its sister mineral malachite, which gives us a range of vivid greens  In this form, azurite looks very like lazurite,

The two minerals have value, though in different directions, Lazurita is a semi precious stone and was once used to make artists’ paints, Azurite is more at home in the modern world of metals and machinery.  Its content may be almost 70 per cent copper and it forms from copper deposits near the surface of the ground  When you find lumps of colorful azurite lying around you may be fairly sure that there is a valuable supply of copper hidden below,

The buried copper tends to react with other minerals to form compounds of copper sulphide, When these compounds era exposed to weathering on the surface they tend to change into the popper carbonates azurite and malachite  When a copper mine is opened, these minerals near the surface may be treated as copper ore until the native copper below is reached,