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NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
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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.''
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