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Murrhina, China-Agate

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ÌURRHÉÍÁ.                                 189
to have agreed to call it Murrhina, upon the axiom that things equally unknown must be identical. Long before that time the Italians had their Porcellana (so called from the pounded shell porcella entering into its composition), a mere glazed earthenware, the secret of which had been taught them by the Moors : which was the reason that afterwards "Porcelain" was improperly applied to the Chinese manufacture, though of a totally different nature. Garcias ah Horto affords a good illustration : " They find a green kind of Jasper, out of which Murrhina are made (called Porcellana) of so bright a green that they might be thought cut out of the Emerald : and such is probably the material of the Sacro Catino at Genoa. A Murrhine vessel of this kind was once offered to me for 200 pardoäs (rupees) ; had it been a true Emerald I could hardly have got the thousandth part of it for that price."
Lambeccius figures (' Bib. Cses.,' vol. i.) of the actual size a very elegant patera with twisted handles, designed in a pure classical style, and then (1665) believed to be hollowed out of one entire Emerald, although more than a foot in diameter, measured over the handles. This therefore must have been, like the Sacro Catino, formed in a brilliant green paste, for certainly no mere green Jasper could in that age have been mistaken for the true Emerald, especially in Vienna, the school of the most learned amongst the early mi­neralogists. The Imperial Library then boasted of the most maguificent example of the true Murrhina ever produced by ancient skill, or preserved, as a most sacred treasure, protected also by superstition, through all the intermediate ages between tho Roman and the Hapsburg Cœsars. Lambeccius calls the material Oriental Agate, which exactly agrees with my foregoing definition of the real signification of the name Murrhina. The form was a patera with gracefully twisted handles, and much resembling the
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