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Aetites, Eagle-Stone

Adamas, Diamond Page of 453 Aetites, Eagle-Stone Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
AETITES.
49
AETITES. Eagle-Stone.
The lively fancy of the Greeks discovered in the forms of natural objects resemblances to other organic forms, and, by a step not very logical, ascribed to them inherent virtues analogous to this interpretation. Of this system the Aetites is perhaps the most illustrative example, and the one also. that the longest maintained its ancient reputation. Pliny describes four species of it (xxxvi. 21). The first was egg-shaped, white, and filled with a soft sweet-tasted clay : this was the female. The second, reddish-coloured externally, contained a stony substance, and passed for the male. The third was filled with a sweetish sand. The fourth, the Laeonian, had inside it a crystalline core, called the Callimus. The best kind were asserted to be only found in the nests of eagles, which could not breed without their aid; hence their name. They, for this reason, were of the greatest benefit to women in labour ; a notion which even Dioscorides appears to endorse. The substance itself, as the specimens figured by De Boot plainly show, was one of those calcareous hollow concretions, sometimes white, sometimes tinged with iron, well known to geologists ; and which appear to be accidental for­mations, not petrifactions of older organised bodies.
The Aetites must not, however, be confounded with another stone named in a fragment of Theophrastus ή lithos των τικ-τοΰσων, " the gem of parturient women ;" to which he also alludes (in section δ) by, " The most wonderful and most important pro­perty is that of the stones that bring forth others." This was the Paeonites, described by Pliny under that name, as reported to con­ceive at a certain time and bring forth another ; therefore very serviceable to women in labour ; found in Macedonia, and in
Adamas, Diamond Page of 453 Aetites, Eagle-Stone
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