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Lyncurium, Jacinth

Lyncurium, Jacinth Page of 453 Magnes, Loadstone Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
LYNCURIUM.
221
Corundum—the Blue, the Red, and the Yellow ; following the Indians, who give the same generic title to all, but distinguish each sort by an epithet, denoting its colour; or, rather the Persians, who divide the " Jacut" (whence " Hyacinthus") into six classes. Now Sapphirinus, ultramarine, being employed to designate the Blue, or most esteemed sort, Rubinus, rosy, the next ; these epithets, the noun being dropped, were used abso­lutely for designating these varieties, and thus became fixed in the jewellers' language as the Sapphire and the Ruby. But a third sort remained, the least valuable of all, the Citrinus or lemon-coloured, so known to medieval writers. These last being the most common retained the generic name. As the importation of gems fell off and gradually became extinct, all yellow stones of superior hardness then circulating throughout Europe got confounded together, the more readily because nothing being now required in the way of engraving or even of polishing these relics of ancient prosperity, the eye was the sole means of estimating their quality and value. Now, the Zircon, a gem the most abundantly employed by the ancients both for intagli and for ornament, was therefore the most plentiful amongst the yellow gems treasured by the barbarian plunderers : it was hard and electric ; it only came from India, the source of the Corundum species as well, and thus by degrees it usurped the name of Hyacinthus, previously borne by the rarer yellow gem, which now became the Citrinus.: Besides this it would require an experienced mineralogist to distinguish by the eye alone a pale bright Zircon from the Oriental Topaz.
Pliny (xxxvii. 13) puts down as equally false with the story of its formation, the notion that the Lyncurium, if drunk in wine, or even worn, would expel the stone in the bladder and cure the jaundice ; an early allusion this to the " Doctrine of Signatures," i. e. that each substance bore a natural mark (here, the colour), pointing out the malady for which it was a specific. Marbodus prescribes this stone for complaints of the chest, for the jaundice, and the diarrhoea. But his contemporary Psellus (De Lapid. Preface) puts down the Lyncurium amongst the stones about which nothing was then definitely known.
Lyncurium, Jacinth Page of 453 Magnes, Loadstone
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