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MURRHINA.
181
This last description is merely the same thing, expressed in his usual farfetched way, as Pliny's, " a liquid substance solidified by subterranean heat." And in this he was won­derfully correct, for the Porcelain Jasper, a cognate ma­terial, is now pronounced to be clay metamorphosed by volcanic action. Or if we choose to take the " Parthis focis " literally, the poet may possibly allude to some method of improving the colour of the stone by heat, as still prac­tised by the Indians with the Carnelian.* These same antiquaries must have wilfully shut their eyes to another line of Propertius (iii. 10), where he makes it synonymous with the Onyx—
"Et croceus nares Murrheus ungat onyx."
Dr. Hager considered Murrhina to be the Yu-stone or Jade vases, in all ages especially valued by the Chinese, which might have been brought by caravans into Carmania. Vel-theim, seriously taking up a jocular remark of Lessing's, maintained that the Murrhine vases were nothing else than those so commonly seen now, made out of that dull-brown mineral streaked with white, the Chinese Steatite (or Speckstein). Böttiger does not attempt to decide the question, but rather inclines to the notion that they were of coloured glass. Corsi thought he had discovered all the required peculiarities in the Fluor Spar or Blue John of Derbyshire ; but it is very doubtful if that substance was known to the Romans at all, the only mines that produce
* " To this day in the neighbourhood of Broach, nodules of Onyx are dug in the dry season from the beds of torrents ; they are then of a dark olive green inclining to grey ; after being exposed to the sun to dry, they are packed in earthen pots with dry goats' dung, which is set on fire. When removed, after cooling, the stones have changed in colour, often to rich hues of orange and hyacinthine red ; and the more ornamental of the mottled Onyxes that come from Cambray are those thus artifici­ally beautified."—Ed. Rev. (July, 1866). See Onyx, p. 230.