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Beryllus, Beryl

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132                                       BERYLLUS.
This nation had also the art of tinging the common Rock crystal so as to pass it off for the Beryl: probably by plunging it when heated into some menstruum saturated with oxide of copper ; as the Rubace of the French is still produced by thus treating a piece of crystal in a spirituous solution of cochineal. Even now the Indians paint the back of every coloured gem they set, so as to improve the fainter tints ; for which reason they never mount them in their jewelry without a backing. From this deceptive practice of adding a fictitious beauty to their gems, those in native Indian ornaments are rarely, when taken out, found to be of much value: all of high intrinsic worth are sold for the European market, the inferior samples when thus painted being deemed good enough for the native jewelry.
Antique engravings in Beryl are almost as rare as in the true Emerald; but with this difference, that intagli in the former stone, as far as my experience goes, belong to an earlier period of the art, being for the most part fine works of the " perfect" Greek school, whereas intagli in the Emerald are invariably of late Roman work, dating from Hadrian's time and his imme­diate successors. To quote a few of the finest, where too the material is hardly to bo distinguished from the sapphire. The earliest is the Taras (or Icadius) on the dolphin, in the Praum Collection, the design of which is placed by Winckelmann in the first class of Etruscan work; a head of Proserpine in the purest Sicilian Greek style, and a hippocampus, both in the Marlborough Gems ; and amongst the best specimens of Roman date, a head of Julia Domna in the same collection, and a most elegant design of Cupid borne over the waves b}r a dolphin amongst the Cracherode gems (British Museum). The grandest intaglio extant of the Roman period is also upon an Aquamarine of the extraordinary magnitude of 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 inches; the bust of Julia Titi, signed by the artistFor nearly a thousand years
it formed the knosp of a golden reliquary presented by Charle­magne to the Abbey of St. Denys, in which it was set with the convex back uppermost, being regarded as an invaluable emerald. The rarity of such Beryl intagli, when of unquestionable an­tiquity, is readily accounted for by the extreme value this, then so rare material, bore amongst the ancients, equal in fact to that
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