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Murrhina, China-Agate

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238
MURRHINA.
made known by the Portuguese in his own days), treats it as ab­surd, and explains the term as designating the vases of Sardonyx, of which he had seen antique fragments. In the last century the French archaeologists, headed by Mariette, adopted the porce­lain explanation, and discovered in Pliny's "purple and white spots " an exact description of the paintings ornamenting China-ware. It is impossible however to conceive anything more absurd than the supposition that an acute observer of nature, like Pliny, and with his knowledge of art, could have mistaken the Chinese drawing, however grotesque, and evidently laid upon the surface by art, for the natural spots and veins in a parti-coloured stone. But these antiquaries disregarded common sense, being so com­pletely led astray by Martial's " murrhina picta " (a mere poetical allusion to its varied colours), and above all by Propertius with
his
" Murrhea que in Parthis pocula coda focis" (iii. 5).
This last description is merely the same thing, expressed in his usual farfetched way, as Pliny's : " a liquid substance solidified by subterranean heat." And in this he was wonderfully correct, for the Porcelain Jasper, a cognate material, is now pronounced to be clay metamorphosed by volcanic action. Or if we choose to take the " Parthis focis " literally, the poet may possibly allude to some method of improving the colour of the stone by heat, as still practised by the Indians with the Carnelian. These antiquaries must have wilfully shut their eyes to another line of Propertius (iii. 10), where he makes it synonymous with the Onyx—
" Et croceus nares Murrheus ungat onyx."
Dr. Hager considered it to be the Yu-stone or Jade vases, so much valued by the Chinese, which might have been brought by caravans into Carmania. Veltheim, seriously taking up a jocular remark of Lessing's, maintained that the Murrhine vases were nothing else than those so commonly seen now, made out of that dull-brown mineral streaked with white, the Chinese Steatite (or Speckstein). Bottiger does not attempt to decide the question, but rather inclines to the notion that they were of coloured glass. Corsi thought he had discovered all the required peculiarities
Murrhina, China-Agate Page of 453 Murrhina, China-Agate
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