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Onyx, Nicolo

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256
ONYX.
engravers, as Caylus has observed, and the experience of all gem-collectors will confirm his observation.
Isidorus of Seville has noted that the old Latin name for a signet was ungulus ; for which ho offers the absurd explanation that it was so called " because the gem covers the ring in the same manner as the nail covers the finger-end." But there can be no doubt that ungulus was merely the literal translation of the Greek ονΰγιον, its derivation from unguis exactly corresponding to that of the original from ονυξ. The Greeks used the dimi­nutive to express that the native substance had been modified to the purposes of art, according to a well-known rule of the language, of which examples are γβυσίον, àpyvpiov, gold, and silver, when coined. For the tricoloured Agate being the usual signet-stone of the Greco-Italians and Sicilians, the Romans, when they began to obtain and to value the works of these engravers, at the same time adopted and Latinised the current designation of the stone. This explanation also throws light upon the ap­parently unintelligible definition of the Onyx extracted by Pliny from that most ancient mineralogist Sotacus, that " it exhibited the colours of the human nail, and also of the chrysolite, the sard, and the jasper :" and also the statement that follows, taken from Zenothemis, that the Indian Onyx presented " many dif­ferent colours ; fiery, black, and like horn, surrounded by opaque white veins like an eye ;" and again that of Satyrus, that the same species was " flesh-coloured, having a part of the chrysolite, another of the amethyst " (xxxvii. 24). For these banded Agates, cut across their layers, often present the most beautiful and vivid colours in strongly contrasted juxta-position. Similarly tbe Sardonyx of the Greeks differed as much in appearance, though not in species, from that of the imperial Romans. Pliny quotes (xxxvii. 23) several Greek mineralogists, to the effect that by the Indian Sardonyx they understood a Sard with a white layer (candore in sarda), and both colours transparent. The opaque kind, which in Pliny's times he notes had engrossed the de­signation, they termed the Blind, and apparently held it in no esteem. It was in fact the same evenly stratified union of calcedony and jasper as their ovvyiov ; with the distinction that its colours were white and red, not white and black : for
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