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Humithres, Amazonite, Labrador

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128                 NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
is found in great plenty in the province Toltotepec, but the stones there are small in size, and on account of their extreme abundance are but little valued."
It has been of late years ascertained that this curious mineral was known to the ancient lapidaries both Oriental and Roman, and that, too, at the very dawn of the Glyptic art. The skilfully-engraved Assyrian cylinder assigned tu Sennacherib (in the British Museum) is described as cut in Amazon-stone ; and certain camei, particularly a veiled head of M. Aurelius (Praun), in a stone the character of which could not be mistaken, have coine under my own observation. Lastly, the question is set at rest by the fact recorded by Corsi, that in some excavations carried on in the ruins of the villa of M. Vopiscus at Tivoli, by Lord Northampton (1820), were discovered fragments of the pedestal either of a statue or a column sculptured in the true Amazon-stone. These fragments were covered with hiero­glyphics ; a fact that, coupled with the necessary large dimensions of the mass, throws an unexpected light upon the nature of the monster Egyptian Smaragdi quoted by Theophrastus, and removes their existence from the domain« of fable. Corsi, indeed, goes on to identify this stone with Pliny's Chalcedonius, on the score of the nacrous reflex that characterized the latter, but the minttteness and fusibility of the crystals of the Chalcedonians are insuperable objections to this theory.
The above-quoted cylinder recalls to one's memory two gems both described by Pliny as productions of Persia, and both seeming, from his brief notice of their properties, to present in different points certain analogies to those of the Amazon-stone. His first is the Tamos : " in colour a disagreeable green, and which is foisted in amongst the Smaragdi ; " and certainly the cameo above alluded to had so much the appearance, that it was described in the
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