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NOTES.
out, I had the larger portion, retaining nearly all my arms, set in another ring, which I still wear constantly."
With the Germans it is still the gem appropriated to the ring, the " gage d'amour," presented by the lover on the acceptance of his suit, the perma­nence of its colour being believed to depend upon the constancy of his affection. Inasmuch as this stone is almost as liable to change, and as capriciously as the heart itself, the omen it gives is verified with sufficient frequency to maintain its reputation for infallibility.
De Boot's statement of the fashionableness and value of the stone in his times illustrates Shakespeare, where he makes Shylock say he would not have lost his Turquois ring " for a whole wilderness of monkeys."
RUBY, p. 152.
Tollius quotes Wolfgang Gabelehow touching a singular property of the Ruby :—" It is worthy of notice that the true Oriental Ruby foretells to the wearer, by the frequent change and darkening of its colour, that some inevitable misfortune or calamity is not far off; and in proportion to the greatness of the evil, so does it assume a greater or less degree of darkness and opacity—a thing which I have heard frequently from persons of the greatest eminence, and have, alas ! experienced in my own person. For on December 5, 1600, as I was travelling from Stutgard to Calloa, in com­pany with my beloved wife Catharine Adelmann, of pious memory, I ob­served most distinctly during the journey, that a very fine Ruby, her gift, which I wore set in a ring upon my finger, had lost once or twice almost all its splendid colour, and had put on obscurity in the place of splendour, and darkness in the place of light, the which blackness and dulness lasted not for one or two days only, but several : so that being above measure alarmed, I took the ring off my finger and locked it up in my trunk. Wherefore I repeatedly warned my wife that some grievous misfortune was impending over either her or myself, as I had inferred from the change of colour in my Ruby. Nor was 1 deceived in my forebodings, inasmuch as within a few days she was taken with a mortal sickness that never left her till her death. After her decease, indeed, its former brilliant colour again returned spontaneously to my Ruby."
NEPHRITE: JADE, p. 238.
This singular mineral is a combination of magnesia and silica, with small proportions of alumina and the oxides of iron and of chrome. In colour it varies from a clear, agreeable olive, the most esteemed, to a soapy greenish white. It is excessively hard, tough, and difficult to work, and appears even to have baffled the skill of the difficulty-seeking gem-engravers of the Renaissance, no works in their peculiar style existing in Jade ; and yet they had every inducement to essay the material, from the high reputation it enjoyed in those times.
This reputation rested upon its supposed virtue as a specific remedy, or
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