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Naxium, Emery

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NAXIUM.
197
so little room for their application. Indeed every really antique cameo on a large scale retains traces that show distinctly how the superfluous parts of the upper stratum have been excised by means of circular perforations.
Sir G. Wilkinson is also of opinion that the Egyptians performed their stupendous sculptures in Basalt, Granite, and other hard rocks, that now speedily turn the edge of the best steel chisels, by using bronze tools constantly sup­plied with Emery-dust, the tool serving only as a medium for driving the cutting particles into the stone. The interior of the hieroglyphics certainly has every appearance of having been bruised in by some such agency. And con­nected with this application of the mineral, a circum­stance arrests our attention which at the first view must strike every one as utterly at variance with the usual order of things. It is the phenomenon that so many, and widely separated, races should at the first dawn of their civiliza­tion have attained to the fullest proficiency in all the mechanical processes of what is assuredly one of the most refined of the arts belonging to luxurious opulence, the art of engraving in " Hard Stones." The strongest illus­trations of this fact, and those too the furthest removed from each other in time as well as in place, are to be dis­covered amongst the remains of the Assyrians and of the Aztecs : the cylinders of the first in Hematite and Agate, the idols of the latter in Jade and Amazon-stone.
But the apparent inconsistency vanishes upon a nearer insight into the " prehistoric annals " of the progress of the human race in the arts of life. The steps, at least in its earliest stages, have been the same pretty nearly for all nations as well as for all ages : for one common instinct has suggested the appliance of similar natural materials to the supplying of similar common wants. The weapons, tools, jewels, of primitive man have ever
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