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Naxium, Emery

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248                                         NAXIUM.
the Greeks, at the time when the art had reached its highest point amongst them, to the Armenian kind, there is reason to suspect the latter was a purer Corundum than the Naxian, and therefore more efficient in engraving. Modem times supply an analogous case in the same process. The Adamantine Spar, when introduced shortly before 1790 (Raspe) into the European lapidaries' ateliers from India, where it had been known from time immemorial, was eagerly received and immediately adopted universally as an enormous improvement upon the old-fashioned Emery-powder. It is self-evident that the Greeks would not have taken the trouble to import from a vast distance, Armenia, precisely the same mineral as they were at the very time obtain­ing from their immediate neighbourhood, Naxos, with the smallest expenditure of labour, and in any quantity required.
The process known to the most barbarous tribes of primeval times, that of drilling holes through stones by the perpetual turning of a stick constantly supplied with sharp sand and water upon the same point, has left us many memorials in the Celtic axe and hammer heads, where the shape of the widely-splayed haft-holes plainly indicates the agents brought into play. These are abundant in regions which do not produce Emery ; but sharp sand, aided by the unlimited expenditure of time, effects the same result.'1
The Assyrian gem-engraver soon perceived the advantage to be derived from an instrument that could hollow out his figures in hemispherical indentations, exactly formed to the size re­quired, in addition to the simple straight cuts which alone he could produce by the original method of filing with the fractured Emery. The perforations traversing the length of all these cylinders prove that already, as soon as they were invented as signets, the principle of the drill was well known. These holes are bored so truly that we discover not merely that they were done with a metal wire, instead of a stick, charged with emery and oil, but that this wire must have been turned by means of a
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