Aristotle, born just a century after Herodotus, touches upon minerals only incidentally, at the end of his four books on Meteors, and sheds upon them no new light.
Theophrastus,
a pupil of Aristotle, wrote a treatise upon precious stones, only a
part of which has reached us. Notwithstanding the defects of this work,
in part attributable to the times and in part to the author, we are
none the less indebted to Theophrastus for the description of a number
of important mineral substances unknown before his time.
We
find also in this writer an idea which, taken by itself, is very
singular: he divides the stones into two categories—male and female.
When the reader remembers what has been said above, however, he will
understand that there is nothing in this idea that is not in harmony
with the general ideas of the ancients.
Dioscorides,
whose valuable writings appeared in the first century of our era,
furnishes, in a minera-logic point of view, no information of
importance. But in another aspect his works are exceedingly
interesting, seeing that we find in them the full development of the
idea that precious stones possess a multitude of secret virtues—an idea
admitted without dispute by all his successors, to a time very closely
approaching our own, and which we find
