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Book IV Sulphur, amber, Pliny's gems, jet, bitumen, naphtha, camphor, maltha, Samothracian gem, thracius stone, obsidianus stone

Book IV Sulphur, amber, Pliny's gems, jet, bitumen, naphtha, camphor, maltha, Samothracian gem, thracius stone, obsidianus stone Page of 251 Book IV Sulphur, amber, Pliny's gems, jet, bitumen, naphtha, camphor, maltha, Samothracian gem, thracius stone, obsidianus stone Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
BOOK IV
71
because when it is rubbed it will attract chaff and other small light ob­jects. For the same reason they called it άρπαγα. If it comes from Ger­many the Moors call it by the Persian name caraben, a name that has the same significance as άρπαγα, and if it comes from Arabia or India it is known by the Arabian name ambra. Serapio calls the German mineral ambra. The younger Greek writers, like the Moors, call the Indian and Arabian amber ambra but they had no cause to employ a foreign name since their language was full of words which were easily adapted to new things. The older Greek writers called all bitumen that had been hard­ened into stone of any color except black electron. The black bitumen was known to them by the names mentioned previously. The older German writers called it glessum (glessite) which in our language signifies glass since some of the yellowish-brown and reddish-brown amber is as trans­parent as glass. The Greeks call this latter vaXos and the German term is seen to be an imitation of the Greek. Today we call it two different names, one of which is gagates since it is, actually, a form of bitumen and the other name comes from the fact that it burns.10 It is called gentarus by the Prussians. The Scythians call all amber sacrium and the reddish yellow varieties sualternicum. The Egyptians call it sacal. Amber is known by a great many names but since I am interested in things and not in words I have mentioned only a few since I have no wish to make several minerals from one and the same mineral. The Moors are in the habit of doing this and they are often in error.
There are no fewer opinions as to what amber may be than there are names for it. Pliny has discussed almost all of these theories. Sophocles was of the opinion that it was the congealed tears of guinea fowls crying for Meleagar.11 A poet is allowed to use his imagination and hence no one who is unprejudiced would give this idea any credulity for it is obviously false. Demostratus thought that amber was the frozen urine of the lynx and he named it lyncurium. For this same reason others have called it langurium after the langur monkeys or, following Zenothemis, langa. It is obvious that this theory is as false as that of the tragic poet. Many say that it is the sap of a tree. Since there are three kinds of amber, namely, tears or drops, gum and resin, none of the writers has ever described in detail the sap or the tree from which it exuded. The writers who have be­lieved that amber is the juice of a tree are the Greeks, Sudines, Metro-dorus, Ctesias, Theomenes, Sotacus and the Latin writer Cornelius Taci­tus. Ctesias wrote that the tree was called aphytacora; Sotacus, electrida. Some writers have described one of these three juices, for example, Aris­totle, who apparently believed that the original juice dropped from a tree. The poets Aeschylus, Philoxenus, Nicander, Euripides, Satyrus and Dionysius write that amber was the tears of a certain poplar tree and Dioscorides mentions these opinions. The Latin poets follow the Greeks
10 Bernstein.
11 the sisters of Meleagar were changed into guinea fowls when he died.
Book IV Sulphur, amber, Pliny's gems, jet, bitumen, naphtha, camphor, maltha, Samothracian gem, thracius stone, obsidianus stone Page of 251 Book IV Sulphur, amber, Pliny's gems, jet, bitumen, naphtha, camphor, maltha, Samothracian gem, thracius stone, obsidianus stone
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