delivered in their Writings many things concerning Gems, which
are so unfit to be credited, and some of them perhaps so impossible to
be true, that I hope the Believers of them will, among the Votaries to
Philosophy, be as great rarities as Gems themselves are among Stones,"
going on to seriously make the following statement: " And we see, that
soft Stone, which is plentifully found near Naples, and commonly call'd the Lapis Lyncarius, being
rubb'd a little and moistened with water, and then expos'd to the Sun
in a due season of the year, will, in a very short time, (as
Eyewitnesses have assured me,) produce Mushrooms fit to be eaten." The
Lapis Lyncurius was either Amber, or more probably, as suggested
by Sir J. Hill, Hyacinth, a variety of Zircon—not at all a good
germinating ground for the spores of mushrooms. And again he says, "
because I find no impossibility that at least some costly and less hard
(though indeed more valuable) Gems, may have considerable operations
upon humane Bodies, some few of which I have had opportunity to be
convinc'd of, I will not indiscriminately reject all the Medicinal
Virtues that Tradition and the Writers about pretious stones have
ascribed to those Noble Minerals." Still, Boyle's book is most
fascinating, and shows he was an active champion of the hypothesis of
the aqueous origin of most minerals, a cause which Gustav Bischof,
nearly two centuries later, again felt the need of impressing on the
scientific world in opposition to the Plutonic theory of the origin of
all minerals and rocks.
In
dealing with the properties anciently ascribed to gems and precious
stones, it is necessary to point out that the old conceptions as to
what was included in these two classes were very different from those
of the present day. By "gem"
