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Murrhina, China-Agate

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180                 NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
do not indeed project, but are embedded in the substance, and that very often. The material is somewhat recom­mended also by its agreeable smell."
Such a description would appear definite enough to enable a mineralogist to identify with ease the exact substance intended, nevertheless upon no one point in the science have so many diverse theories been propounded. De Boot, after citing the then prevailing notion that the Murrhine vessels were Chinese porcelain (recently made known by the Portuguese in his own days), treats it as absurd, and explains the term as designating the vases of Sardonyx, of which he had seen antique fragments. In the last century the French archaeologists, headed by Mariette, adopted the porcelain explanation, and discovered in Pliny's " purple and white spots " an exact description of the paintings ornamenting Chinaware ! It is impossible, how­ever, to conceive anything more preposterous than the supposition that an acute observer of nature, like Pliny, and with his knowledge of art, could have mistaken the Chinese drawing, however grotesque, but evidently laid upon the surface by human skill, for the natural spots and veins in a parti-coloured stone. Old Dom Doublet could have taught Mariette better, by his apt description of a vase in the Treasury of St. Denys : " Un calice très exquis, fait d'une très belle Agathe, gaudronné par dehors ; admirable par la beauté et la variété des couleurs qui s'y sont trouvées naturellement esparses ça et là en façon de papier marbré.' A comparison affording an undesigned translation of the maculosa murrha, above quoted. But these antiquaries dis­regarded common sense, being so completely led astray by Martial's " murrhina picta " (a mere poetical allusion to its varied colours), and above all by Propertius with his
** Murrheaque in Partkis pocula coda focis " (iv. 5). "And Murrhine vases baked in Parthian fires."'
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