Bill & Carol Smith Collection Bill and Carol Smith collected sulfosalts in general, but they collected bournonite as an impressive stand-alone suite with representation from many disparate localities.

This is quite a historic specimen. This is an original Roebling specimen that Bill Smith traded for from the National Museum of Natural History in 1955. All the labels are there including the original Roebling, U.S. National Museum, and the label from Dr. C. Hintze whom Roebling acquired it from. The specimen is a plate of matrix covered with bladed siderite typical of the locality with several small bournonite crystals scattered on the siderite. The largest bournonite crystals has been at least repaired and possibly faked onto the specimen, but given the provenance I don’t want to remove it to find out exactly what happened. Roebling wrote on the Hintze label “Hintze glued the crystal on”, and on his own label he writes “The crystal was knocked off and glued on again”.