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Show Depreciation In the Price of Onyx. Among the art treasures which used to adorn tho drawing room irrhis marble palace, now occupied by the Manhattan club, A. T. Stewart cherished a block of Mexican onyx twelve inches square and about seven-eighths of an inch tlrfck. He gave $700 for it, and it was considered an unusually big, rare piece of what was then a riecious stone. So rapidly have the onyx deposits of Mexico been developed de-veloped since the day of the merchant prince, however, that a piece of onyx the same size as the one the great trader valued so highly can now be purchased in New York for about $5, or for a good deal less than one-hundredth part of the price he paid. Blocks of onyx of eight feet are now shipped here, cut np to commercial size in Brooklyn and sent to the New England factories to be polished. For interior decoration onyx black African Afri-can marble, so- long used almost exclusively, exclu-sively, has been almost superseded by the mottled stone now found in such abundance on our own continent. New York Letter. |