allel to the prism. Although celestine much resembles barytes in its
physical properties, having for example the same degree of hardness (3),
it is less dense, its specific gravity being 3.9. Celestine is a less
abundant mineral than barytes. It is, however, much more soluble, and
occurs frequently in mineral waters. W.W. Stoddart showed that many
plants growing on Keuper marls containing celestine near Bristol
appropriated the strontium salt, and the metal could be detected
spectroscopically in their ashes.

Celestine occurs in the Triassic rocks of Britain, especially in veins
and geodes in the Keuper marl in the neighbourhood of Bristol. At
Wickwar and Yate in Gloucestershire it is worked for industrial
purposes. Colourless crystals, of great beauty, occur in association
with calcite and native sulphur in the sulphur deposits of Sicily, as at
Girgenti. Fine blue crystals are yielded by the copper mines of
Herrengrund, in Hungary; a dark blue fibrous form is known from Jena;
and small crystals occur in flint at Meudon near Paris. Very large
tabular crystals are found in limestone on Strontian Island in Lake
Erie; and a blue fibrous variety from near Frankstown, Blair Co., Penn.,
is notable as having been the original celestine on which the species
was founded by A.G. Werner in 1798.

Celestine is much used for the preparation of strontium hydrate, which
is employed in refining beetroot sugar in Germany. The mineral is used
also as a source of various salts of strontium such as the nitrate,
which finds application in pyrotechny for the production of red fire.
(F. W. R.*)

CELESTINES, a religious order founded about 1260 by Peter of Morrone,
afterwards Pope Celestine V. (1294). It was an attempt to unite the
eremitical and cenobitical modes of life. Peter's first disciples lived
as hermits on Mount Majella in the Abruzzi. The Benedictine rule was
taken as the basis of the life, but was supplemented by regulations
notably increasing the austerities practised. The form of government was
borrowed largely from those prevailing in the mendicant orders. Indeed,
though the Celestines are reckoned as a branch of the Benedictines,
there is little in common between them. For all that, St Celestine,
during his brief tenure of the papacy, tried to spread his ideas among
the Benedictines, and induced the monks of Monte Cassino to adopt his
idea of the monastic life instead of St Benedict's; for this purpose
fifty Celes