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Sucoinum, Amber

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304
NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
mantle of his hero Theagenes " a Pallas carved out ot amber ;" the bust of the goddess it may be presumed. The most precious example extant of Roman carving in this substance is a ring (Waterton) formed into an elegant design with Cupids in full relief upon the shoulders, cut out of a single piece.
To the very last, as wo see from the article in Epipha-nius on the " Lyncurium," there is always an uncertainty whether the Greeks understood Amber or Zircon under that name, or its other form Langurium. Though Theo-phrastus (28) sufficiently shows that his Lyncurium is a Zircon, by mentioning its extreme hardness, and employ­ment for signet-stones, yet Pliny (13) asserts that, if the Greek mineralogists did not understand Amber by that name (otherwise, Langurium), there was no such thing in existence ; adding that the whole account of its origin was a mere fable.
Pliny, after craving the indulgence of his readers, takes occasion to expose " the love of lying distinguishing the Greeks, since there was some advantage in knowing all their marvellous tales ;" and proceeds to enumerate the various fictions by which they had accounted for the pro­duction of Amber. The most ancient of these, resting chiefly on the authority of the poets, made it to be the tears which the Electrides, changed into poplars along the banks of the Eridanus, dropped upon the death of their brother Phaëthon. Others made it distil from trees in cer­tain islands far up in the Adriatic. The explanation of its being the condensed urine of the lynx had also many supporters, and the habitat of these beasts was placed in the north of Italy.* Sudines and Metrodorus endeavoured
* The North of Italy was the same Terra Fabulosa to the earlier Greeks, that India became to the later, as the knowledge of geography extended.
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