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Chalcedonius, Calcedony

Ceraunia, Thunder-bolt Page of 384 Chalcedonius, Calcedony Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
     
     
 
82 NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
  
 
 
  
 
CHALCEDONIUS : calcedony.
The Chalcedonius of Pliny was an inferior species of the Smaragdus, so called from being found in the copper-mines near Chalcedon. The supply of these particular stones had failed before his times, the mines being no longer worked; but he describes them as having been small and brittle, changing their colour when moved about, like the green feathers in the necks of peacocks and pigeons. But from the remark of Theophrastus (25), that they were seldom found large enough for ring-stones, but were used for soldering gold, and answered that purpose quite as well as Chrysocolla, it is evident that they were only crystals of transparent Chrysocolla, still popularly termed the Copper-emerald, and which to the eye have much the appearance of the true Peruvian gem.
It is difficult to trace the steps by which this name has been transferred from a substance of a brilliant green colour to one so totally distinct in all its characters as is our Calcedony (White Carnelian), a semi-opaque quartz of a milky tinge, and answering exactly to Pliny's Leu-cachates. The transition would appear to have been thus effected. The epithets Calchedonius and Carchedonius, so readily confounded together in the uncertain orthography of MSS., became inextricably intermingled in the ideas of the mediaeval mineralogists. Now Pliny's Carchedonius, so called as being brought from Carthage (Êáñ÷çäùí), was a Carbuncle, showing as it were stars within its substance,
  
 
 
  
     
Ceraunia, Thunder-bolt Page of 384 Chalcedonius, Calcedony
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