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334 NATURAL HISTORY OF PRECIOUS STONES, &c.
when the dark nooks of the Shah's or Sultan's treasure-vaults come to be ransacked by the Eussian heir apparent to the " two sick men," who already
" Circam loculos et claves lsetus ovansque Currit."
What a source of rejoicing both to archaeologists, and above all to the religious world, will be the identification of even one of these venerable relics ! A contingency by no means to be pronounced chimerical in an age which has witnessed the resuscitation of Sennacherib's own cup, signet, and queen's portrait.
THE NEW JERUSALEM.
In St. John's vision (xxi. 1) of " the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," he depicts her walls as built out of twelve courses of precious stones. It is a singular fact that these stones are not arranged here in the same order as in the Rationele, a collocation we should have expected so thoroughly Hebrew a writer to have adopted as a matter of course, the more especially as they represent the same idea in both cases. Instead of this, he has most ingeniously disposed them according to their various shades of the same colour, as the following list will demonstrate, taking them in order from the bottom upwards :—
1. Jaspis, dark green. 2. Sapphirus, blue. 3. Chalce-don, a greenish blue sort of Emerald.*
4. Smaragdus, bright green. 5. Sardonyx, red and white. 6. Sardius, bright red.
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