San Felipe, San Felipe Municipality, Baja California, Mexico

Ex. Kurt Hefendehl

Cabinet, 10.1 x 6.2 x 4.6 cm

Here we have an attractive piece of the old San Felipe sulfur specimens featuring many sharp, lustrous, well-formed, bright yellow colored modified crystals measuring up to 5 mm on matrix. When you look closely, you can see the crystals are really eye-catching, and I had a lot of fun looking at the multi-faceted form, giving them an almost spherical or "finger"-like shape. For reference, this species should be spelled S-U-L-F-U-R (not sulphur) as both the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry along with the British Royal Society of Chemistry adopted this spelling in the 1990s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur#Spelling_and_etymology). Wikipedia also states that, "Sulfur is derived from the Latin word sulpur, which was Hellenized to sulphur in the erroneous belief that the Latin word came from Greek."

From the collection of Kurt Hefendehl (#199 Mx), a well-known German collector all over Europe with worldwide contacts to dealers and collectors. He started collecting seriously at the age of 14 and his great and varied worldwide collection reached over 6000 pieces. He was very active mineralogically until shortly before his passing in 2020 at the age of 82. Considering his collection had a large number of pieces, it still had an unusually high standard of quality from most worldwide localities. He particularly specialized in all classics as well as minerals of the Black Forest, where he spent much time collecting. His Black Forest and German subcollections went to his good friend Wolfgang Wendel