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Naxium, Emery

Naxium, Emery Page of 453 Naxium, Emery Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
250
NAXIUM.
hard rocks, which now speedily turn the edge of the best steel chisels, by using bronze tools constantly supplied with emery-dust, the tool serving only as a medium for driving the cutting particles into the stone. The interior of the hieroglyphics cer­tainly has every appearance of having been bruised in by some such application. It will be noticed that Pliny mentions the employment of the same mineral in polishing statues as in engraving gems.
There is a Eabbinical tradition testifying to the extreme anti­quity of the employment of the Smyris in gem-engraving. Moses, they tell, engraved the stones of the Rationale by means of the blood of the worm Samir, so powerful a solvent as to subdue the hardest gem, and leave a hollow wherever the characters had been traced therewith. In after ages, when Solomon was about to build the Temple with stones untouched by the tool, the source whence Moses had obtained the Samir had been lost in the darkness of antiquity. But Solomon's wisdom speedily sug­gested a method for its recovery. He enclosed an ostrich-chick in a glass vase and set a watch upon it ; the parent, finding it impossible to break the vase by force, flew off to the desert, and returned with a supply of the wonderful reptile, the application of which speedily dissolved the glass and released her chick. By repeating this stratagem, a sufficient supply of the potent menstruum was obtained. The root of " Samir " is evidently the same as that of "Smyris;" and there is another point of analogy between the significations. Samir is explained by some Eabbins as meaning the Diamond or Adarnas ; now it is almost demonstrable that the Adamas of the early Greeks, before the Indian Diamond had found its way among them, was every kind of Corundum, whether precious stone or instrument of art. The Jews, whose artists were all called in when required from foreign nations, Phoenicia chiefly, had preserved a tradition of the use of Smir in the cutting of their famous Breastplate, and, with their usual love of the marvellous and the absurd, invented the rest of the legend. There seems, however, always to have prevailed a notion amongst Orientals that gems could be softened by che­mical means : a trace of this appears in Pliny's repetition of the fable that the Diamond could only be broken after maceration in
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