248 A POPULAR TREATISE ON GEMS.
it
becomes electric by friction ; heated by itself, the garnet grows
darker, but resumes its color when cooled ; it fuses before the
blowpipe into a black pebble. Its chemical constituents are silica,
alumina, and the protoxides of iron and manganese.
Garnet has names according to the different shadings of color :
1st.
Syrian garnet, which is also called the Oriental and precious garnet,
almandine, carbuncle ; this is of a blood-red, dark crimson color.
2d. Bohemian, or Ceylonese garnet, called the pyrope ; wine-red, nearly orange-yellow, deep colored.
3d. Vermeille, or Aplome, having a deep shade of orange-yellow.
Pliny
describes vessels of the capacity of a pint, formed from carbuncles—"
non claros ac plerumque sordidos ac semper fulgoris horridi"—devoid of
lustre and beauty of color, which probably were large common garnets.
The garnet is also supposed to have .been the hyacinth of the ancients.
Pyrope
is described as presenting a dark blood-red color by reflected light,
but yellow by transmitted light. Pyrope was so called from πυρ, fire, οπτομαι, to see, in allusion to its color.
The
almandine, or precious garnet, is transparent and brownish-red, while
pyrope is blood-red. The' red garnet occurs imbedded in mica slate,
granite, and gneiss, rarely in limestone, chlorite slate, serpentine,
and lava, and is found in the greatest perfection in Ceylon, in the
sand ot rivers ; and in the alluvial soil of Pegu, Hindostan, Brazil,
and Greenland ; in Bohemia, in alluvium, near Collin ; in gneiss at
Zbislau; in Tyrol, in the Oetzthal, and on,the Greiner, in Carinthia,
Styria; in Switzerland; at Ariolo, Canaria, Maggia; in Hungary, Sweden,
Norway, Scotland, Spain ; and in the United States, in North Carolina,
Geor-
