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Beryllus, Beryl

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134
BERYLLUS.
thus explains in his second chapter, saying, " the Beryl is a shining, colourless, transparent stone, to which a concave as well as a convex form is given by art ; and looking through it one sees what was before invisible." Probably the first idea of this invention was caught by accidentally looking through a double-convex and clear Beryl, or one cut en cabochon (the usual form given to antique transparent gems), and hence concluding that a piece of glass similarly shaped would produce the same effect in magnifying minute objects. Mediaeval glass being never colourless, but always tinged more or less with green, the resem­blance as to colour and form of a lens in such a material to an actual Beryl was sufficiently obvious to induce the communi­cation of the name to the new discovery. Protoprodronius, as early as 1150, humorously describes the physicians of Manuel Comnenus as using the υέλιον to examine the nature of his evacuations : and this Lessing supposes very plausibly to mean a magnifying lens (Ant. Briefe, xlv.)—
Now this is the very term valos used by Socrates to describe a burning glass (and consequently a magnifying lens) in Aris­tophanes (Nubes, 758). By some lucky accident the observer of this property in his Beryl had been led by induction to apply a fact, similar to that involved in Nero's use of his Eme­rald lorgnette [Emerald] so many centuries before, to the working out of a most important result, through the happy thought that the marvellous effect was due not to the occult virtue of the gem itself,3 but to the artificial shape of the stone.
In the absurd nomenclature of the English lapidaries in the last century, as Lessing has noticed, the name of Beryl was given to every variety of the Sard in which yellow pre­dominated : the red alone, following the French example, was distinguished as the Cornelian. Dr. Woodward and Hill both
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