of
the moon and the sparkling of the firmament of stars, to the ceaseless
surge of the ocean and the mountain summits wreathed in clouds, — to
all the grander aspects and motions of nature, — before his eyes were
drawn to lesser things outside the petty circle of his rambling and the
sating of his crude animal wants. Mayhap thousands of years of brutal
life rolled by before the savage stooped to pick up any one of the
gleaming pebbles which the fierce tiger spurned with bounding foot and
the flying deer trampled heedlessly on the river's bank.
Any
one may guess, and any one's guess is as good as another's, what little
pebble first drew the glance of the barbarian's eye or the stoop of the
rover's knee. The first-known precious stones of the world were
undoubtedly found on the face of the ground, without any wearisome
digging or quarrying, as they lay shining in the gravel, washed from
hillsides over the plains, or along the courses of rivers swelled by
floods and sweeping the parings of the earth's crust to the sea.
Thousands of carnelians, garnets, jasper, amethysts, sapphires, rubies,
and diamonds were picked up, maybe by children rummaging in gravel beds
or the clefts of rocks, and thrown away as carelessly as splinters of
flint, before one was preserved and prized. White and tinted shells
were much easier to collect and pierce and link together, and rude
armlets and leg-bands of copper and silver and gold were easily forged,
and more to the savage taste than any necklace of stones.1
When
some of the precious stones were lifted and borne away from their beds
in drifts of gravel, they were valued first chiefly for the mystic
powers attributed to pebbles of such rich hues, phenomenal hardness,
and peculiar lustre. One of them would be worn in a pouch next to the
bosom as an amulet or charm, averting peril, inspiring courage, healing
diseases, repelling evil spirits, or winning the love of scornful
maidens. Or, if any one of these magic stones was set to gleam in the
buckle of a warrior's plume, it was less for a show of ornament than for
1 "A Treatise on Diamonds and Precious Stones," John Mawe, London, 1813.
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