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Lyncurium, Jacinth

Lyncurium, Jacinth Page of 384 Magnes, Loadstone Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
168
NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
abundantly employed by the ancients both for engraving on and for ornament, was therefore the most plentiful amongst the yellow gems treasured by the barbarian plunderers was hard and electric ; it came from India only, the source of the Corundum species as well, and thus by degrei usurped and engrossed the name of Hyacinthus, previously borne by the rarer yellow gem, which now became the Citrinus. Besides, it would require an experienced mine­ralogist to distinguish by the eye alone a pale bright Zircon, or Essonite, from the Oriental Topaz.
Pliny (xxxvii. 13) puts down as equally false with the story of its formation, the notion that the Lyncurium, if drunk in wine, or even worn, would expel the stone in the bladder and cure the jaundice—an early allusion this to the "Doctrine of Signatures," i. e. that each substance bore a natural mark (in this case, the colour), pointing out the malady for which it was a specific* Marbodus prescribes this stone for complaints of the chest, for the jaundice, and the diarrhoea. But his contemporary Psellus (' De Lapid.' Preface) reckons the Lyncurium amongst the stones about which nothing was then definitely known.
* A doctrine yet more plainly enounced in his description of the Icterias, " resembling in colour the human skin when of a sickly yellow, and for that, reason esteemed efficacious against the jaundice.''
Lyncurium, Jacinth Page of 384 Magnes, Loadstone
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