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3Φ
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PRECIOUS STONES.
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sea, which resembles gum, and tells us that the Chinese grandees burned it at their feasts for perfumery, on account of the
agreeable odor it exhaled during combustion. It is possible this traveller may have mistaken ambergris, a product, it is supposed, of the sperm-whale, for amber. It is conceded by modern scientists that it is a fossil resin
or gum, derived from an extinct species of pine and other plants, of the Tertiary period. Sir David Brewster established the fact of its vegetable origin, which had been conceded eighteen centuries before his time. That it was once a viscous fluid is proved by the insects and plants imprisoned in the substance. There have been found one hundred and sixty-three species of insects entombed in amber, many of them identical with those of the present da} ; while the plants are different from the vegetation now found in the regions in which it occurs. It is very soft and light, and possesses a remarkable negative-electrical property ; it is transparent to translucent, and affords yellow, reddish, and whitish varieties. The Baltic, the Urals, Switzerland, France, England, Sicily,
and some other places of Europe, yield this substance ; it also occurs in several localities in the United States, especially in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but in small quantities. A large part of the amber of modern times is obtained from the Prussian Baltic, where the government protects the monopoly of the trade with very stringent laws. The yellow amber of Dantzic, it is estimated, yields from fifty thousand to eighty thousand francs annually ; even in Tavernier's day it was farmed out by the Elector of Brandenburg for more than twenty thousand crowns a year. Sometimes it is found in large masses ; Pliny mentions a specimen at Rome weighing thirteen pounds, and there is one in Berlin which weighs eighteen pounds. Mr. King speaks of an elastic amber ring |
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