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Achates, Agate

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8                       NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
irresistibly obtrudes itself that such a group, though actu­ally existing in the royal ring, was nothing more than a cameo-engraving, but passed off by the jocose Greek, sporting with their simplicity, upon the Roman envoys, utter novices then in art, as an unparalleled miracle of Nature.
To give a few examples of similar deceptions in later times. The Shrine of St. Elizabeth (Marburgh), made in 1250, had for its chief glory, amongst the innumerable precious stones embellishing its surface, a large Cameo set above the statuette of the Virgin. It was a fine Sardonyx of three layers, representing the heads of Castor and Pollux, and was through the whole extent of the Middle Ages re­garded as an inestimable production of Katnre, and for which a former Elector of Mayence once offered in ex­change, but without success, the whole village of Anemci-neburgh. Even Camillo, the contemporary of Lorenzo dei Medici, is still so far under the influence of Gothic notions as to admit the possibility of the existence of similar lusus Naturae. " In the second manner, stones seem as if en­graved by the hand of Nature, when a portion of one stone adheres to the surface of another stone : or again, when some parts out. of the same stone are deficient, through which addition or diminution a certain figure is produced, as is done by art in the case of Camei (in chamainis). And so, after this manner, it is possible for there to be stones engraved by Nature as well as engraved by Art " (III. p. 174.) Again, that Camei were popularly regarded in Gothic times as the work of sportive Nature is almost demonstrable from the way in which Agricola notices one then shown in the Church of the Three Kings, Cologne. He terms it an Onyx, more than a palm wide, in which the white veins mark out the heads of two youths, with a serpent in black, running from the one forehead to the
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