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King: Precious Stones and Gems

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VI
PREFACE.
The outline has now been carefully corrected and extensively amplified, and filled up by my subsequent researches, and by observations made in some important collections which have since passed under my examination. The translations illustrating the former sketch have necessarily, on account of their importance and interest, been employed, after revision, in the remodelling of the articles to which they applied.
In thus considering my subject from the antique point of view, a remarkable feature presents itself in a conspicuous light, though one which doubtless will be altogether new to the generality of my readers. This is the consideration of gems as magical and medicinal agents, perhaps the most important of their characteristics in later antiquity, as it certainly was throughout the whole course of the Middle Ages, when the beauty or rarity of a stone went for infinitely less in the estimation of its value (the Toadstone, for example) than its reputed virtue in the Pharmacopoeia. This curious division of my subject, which indeed contains the entire mediaeval natural history of the same, has been utterly neglected hitherto. Yet it has always seemed to me full of interest; and it is hoped that the facts collected in its illus­tration, and the strange superstitions connected therewith, will render it equally interesting to others, especially to such as take a pleasure in resuscitating old-world modes of thought. With this view the translation of Orpheus 'On Stones' has been appended; that poem, besides its own merits, being the sole (and perhaps the most ancient) representative left of the mystic lore of Chaldea; that " magorum infanda vanitas," which, ridiculed by the philosophers of the age, but fondly and fully believed in by their contemporaries of every rank, and augmented as time went on with yet more monstrous fables, remained the established faith down to the days of our own great-grandfathers.
My second object being to exhibit the relation borne by these matters to ornamental art, I have everywhere inserted
King: Precious Stones and Gems Page of 453 King: Precious Stones and Gems
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