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I'm Tony Kampf.
I'm the former curator, they call me a Curator Emeritus,
here at the Natural History Museum.
I started here at the beginning of 1977.
So I've been here for quite awhile,
and enjoyed every minute of it.
My role has been acquisitions for the collection,
working on our gallery.
In fact, I was here when our current gallery went in back
in 1978.
That was my first job here at the museum.
My first task, if you will, was to install the gallery.
And, of course, I do research.
That's one of my primary reasons for being here now.
Now that I'm retired, I still come in every day
and I do research.
This assortment of specimens here
that I'd like to talk about covers a wide range,
in fact, the complete range, of the sorts of acquisitions
that the museum makes, in terms of how we get things.
This piece here, one of the finest matrix specimens
of tourmaline from the Himalaya Mine down in San Diego County,
was acquired back in the 1960s from a mineral dealer.
This is a specimen that we purchased
from Martin Ehrmann, one of the foremost dealers
in fine minerals back in those days.
This is something that Bill Larson
has called the finest matrix tourmaline from the Himalaya
Mine.
Of course, he called it that before
some other remarkable specimens came out,
so maybe it doesn't currently rate that way.
But it's certainly our finest matrix specimen
from the Himalaya Mine.
The quality of a piece like this is judged in a variety of ways.
You look at a number of features.
You look at the quality of the crystals, first and foremost.
And you look at how they go together
on the matrix, the composition of the piece,
as you will, just like an art work.
It's more than the sum of its parts.
It's how it's put together.
And here you can see a nice assortment
of quartz crystals forming the matrix,
and the tourmaline crystals growing
in a rather lovely array across the quartz crystals here,
and beautifully terminated, multi-colored, fine condition.
Really, quite a nice piece.
Here's another piece that actually was originally
handled by the same person from whom we purchased
this piece, but a long time earlier.
This is a specimen that Martin Ehrmann actually
obtained as part of the Kunz collection back the 1930s.
This is a kunzite, named after Frederick Kunz.
And it's our finest kunzite in our collection.
It is from California.
It came out very early in the 1900s from the Pala Chief Mine.
It's something we haven't had all that long.
We actually obtained it in an exchange
with Harvard University.
And it's something that they had since they purchased it back
in the 1930s, from a mineral dealer who was just
getting his start then, Martin Ehrmann.
He bought the crystal from the estate of Frederick Kunz.
In fact, he handled the Kunz collection back in those days.
And he continued right up through the 1960s
as one of the more prominent mineral dealers in the country.
But interesting part of the story
is that the specimen, or one of the specimens, that we traded
to Harvard for this kunzite was one
that we'd purchased from the same dealer, Martin Ehrmann,
in the 1960s.
So we donated a specimen to Harvard
that we bought from Martin Ehrmann in the 1960s for one
that they bought from Martin Ehrmann back the 1930s.
So both of us were quite happy because this one, essentially,
was repatriated to California, while the specimen we traded
to Harvard was a rutilated quartz that
came from Vermont, in New England.
So we repatriated that to New England.
I've made quite a number of trips
to Brazil, leading tours and looking
for interesting minerals down there.
One of my first trips down there, back in the 1980s,
is one in which I acquired this specimen.
This is a morganite, actually, a morganite
with a rind of aquamarine.
And it's intriguing because the central portion
of the crystal in here is the gem nodule.
And gem nodules are known quite commonly
to occur in tourmaline.
But they hadn't really been noticed before,
to any great extent, in beryls.
And so I found this specimen quite remarkable.
And with the help of one of our donors
back in those days, Hyman Savanar,
we acquired this specimen.
He paid for it and donated it to the museum.
This came from the Bananal Mine, in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
It's interesting.
This piece here was carved.
This multi-faced head was carved from a piece
from the same mine, from the Bananal Mine.
And it's called Nefertiti.
I don't know if it actually looks like Nefertiti.
But that was supposed to be the subject of the carving.
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