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Chalcedonius, Calcedony

Ceraunia, Thunder-bolt Page of 453 Chalcedonius, Calcedony Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
CHALCEDONIUS.                                  157
CHALCEDONIUS.
The Chalcedonius of Pliny was an inferior species of the Sma-ragdus, so called from being found in the copper-mines near Chalcedon. The supply of them had failed before his times, the mines being no longer worked; but he describes them as small and brittle, changing their colour when moved about, like the green feathers in the necks of peacocks and pigeons. But from the remark of Theophrastus (25) that they were seldom found large enough for ring-stones, but were used for soldering gold, and answered that purpose quite as well as Chrysocolla, it is evident that they were only crystals of transparent Chryso­colla, still popularly termed the Copper-Emerald, and which to the eye have much the appearance of the true Peruvian gem.
It is difficult to trace the steps by which this name has been transferred from a substance of a brilliant green colour to one so totally distinct in all its characters as our Calcedony (White Carnelian), a semi-opaque quartz of a milky tinge, and answering exactly to Pliny's Leucachates. The transition would appear to have been thus effected. The epithets Calchedonius and Car-chedonius, so readily confounded together in the uncertain ortho­graphy of MSS., became inextricably intermingled in the ideas of the mediaeval mineralogists. Now his Carchedonius, so called as being brought from Carthage (Καρχήδων), was a Carbuncle, showing as it were stars within its substance, and of sufficient size for cups to be cut out of it. Epiphanius and the Vulgate render Χα\κη8ων, the third stone in the foundations of the New Jerusalem, by Smaragdus, but the A. V. translates it " Car­buncle." Marbodus adopts both renderings, for in his ' Lapi-darium ' he places the Chalcedon between the Emerald and the Beryl in colour, but paler, " Chalcedon lapis est hebeti pallore
Ceraunia, Thunder-bolt Page of 453 Chalcedonius, Calcedony
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