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Sardonyx

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290                 NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
last had learnt from the Romans to admire these stones : " they, that is to say the lower classes,* wear them bored and strung for necklaces, but make no other use of them. This perforation is now considered the sure mark of the Indian kind."
This last remark satisfactorily accounts for the fine hole so often to be discovered passing through the axis of Sardonyx camei. The stones imported in the shape of oval beads were subsequently cut down into flattened disks, so as to present their layers properly disposed for the working out of the, artist's design. From ignorance of the original destination of the material, many anti­quaries have been puzzled to explain the object of these minute perforations ; and still more the method by which they had been drilled through such thin slabs without splitting them. The commonness of the stone in India appears from the exaggerated tale repeated by Philo-stratus (Ap. Tyan. iii. 27) : " The stones that come from India, amongst the Greeks indeed are set in rings and necklaces, but amongst the Indians are of sufficient size to make flaggons and wine-coolers, and bowls holding enough to quench the thirst of four droughty men upon a summer's day."
As the principal merit of the substance lay in the evenness and contrast of the colours, the Romans rarely engraved intagli upon it. They employed it in then-jewelry and rings, cut either en cabochon or in a truncated cone of an oval section, more or less high, so proportioned as to display the three zones to the greatest perfection; making them all, by grinding down the surface and the base to the due thickness, as nearly equal as possible:
* A curious proof of the permanence of all usages amongst the Hin­doos, the chaplot, the ex oßcio badge of a fakir, is to this day made of Sardonyx-beads.
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