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OBSIDIANUM.
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211
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at present being in the Lipari Isles and under Mount Hecla.
In
Pliny's time it was largely imitated in glass, employed as a material
for plates and dishes. A similar black glass was a favourite medium in
the last century for making pastes after antique gems, which, renders
it often difficult to distinguish the antique engravings in the real
Obsidian from these modern fabrications, unless by the test of the
file. For Obsidian, notwithstanding its vitreous nature, possesses the
hardness of the Garnet, and its splinters will deeply scratch into the
surface of any paste, for which property Pliny recommends them as the
surest test for the detection of the latter mode of imposition.
There was a curious pedantic error prevalent in the same century of calling all antique pastes Obsidian, merely
because Pliny had mentioned the imitation of this particular stone in
glass. But Pastes, generically, are termed by him " vitreœ gemmae, used for setting in the rings of the populace" (xxxv. 30).
Orpheus
(282) prescribes " the stern Opsian stone " as an ingredient in a
curious magical recipe. It was to be mixed with amber, " the tears of
the pine," myrrh, and the flaky talc, when the compound would return
oracles " concerning all things about to happen, whether good or evil,
and give to know whatever thou mayest desire."
The
Mexicans are" described by Ximenes, an early Spanish missionary, as
making razors and knives out of Obsidian with great dexterity. Holding
the block between their two feet, they, with a wooden instrument
shaped like a musket-butt, struck off flakes. The modern Indians still
manufacture Obsidian arrow-heads by splintering off thin flakes from
the mass by means of a peculiar and dexterous pressure with the point
of a goat's horn, in a manner that can only be understood by actual
inspection. The Celtic
r 2
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