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Opalus, Opal

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OPALUS.
273
green (viridis suo modo aër), a gleam of purple, and also a certain golden, vinous hue ; always the last in sight, and always crowned by the purple. The gem appears steeped in these colours singly, and yet in all at once : no other is more limpid, or agreeable to the eye. The best kind is found in India, where it is called Sangenon ; the next in Egypt, termed there Tenites ; the third is the Arabian." A passage this, leading to the same conclusion as the one previously quoted, viz., that the Paederos properly signified the Opal, though applied to the Amethyst. The defects of the true Opal are thus enumerated ; if its colour passed off into that of the flower called heliotropium, or into that of crystal or of hail ; if it were intermixed with salt, or flaws, or little points that struck the eye.
No other gem was so successfully imitated by a glass paste (similitudine indiscreta) : the only test for such being to hold them in the sun, when, if the false gems were poised upon the finger and thumb against his rays, the same colour showed through the mass unchanged, and was spent within itself. In the real Opal, on the contrary, the colour perpetually changed, shoot­ing forth now beams of one, now of another colour, and diffusing their lustre over the fingers supporting it. Nothing shows the wonderful skill of the ancient glass-workers so clearly as this testimony of Pliny's to their success in counterfeiting the Opal, a gem which has hitherto baffled the skill of the Parisian paste-fabricant, to produce an imitation at all capable of deceiving the connoisseur.1
From its then enormous value, as well as on account of its fragile nature, the Opal must have been rarely submitted to the skill of the Roman engraver ; for the earlier Greeks were totally unacquainted with the gem. Hence Professor Urlichs justly pronounces unique the Opal of the Praun Collection, en­graved with the head of Sol between those of Jupiter and Luna.
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