380 CURIOUS LORE OF PRECIOUS STONES
"semitertian" fever and epilepsy.17
The use of the emerald to rest and relieve the eye is the only remedial
use of a precious stone mentioned by Theophrastus in his treatise on
gems, written in the third century b.c. Alluding to its powers as an antidote for poisons, Bueus asserts 18 that
if the weight of eighty barley-corns of its powder were given to one
dying from the effects of poison, the dose would save his life. The
Arabs prized emeralds highly for this purpose, and Abenzoar states
that, having once taken a poisonous herb, he placed an emerald in his
mouth and applied another to his stomach, whereupon he was entirely
cured.19
A
certain cure for dysentery also was to wear an emerald suspended so
that it touched the abdomen and to place another emerald in the mouth.
Michaele Pas-chali, a learned Spanish physician of the sixteenth
century, declared that he had effected a cure of the disease by means
of the emerald in the case of Juan de Mendoza, a Spanish grandee, and
Wolfgang Gabelchover, of Calw, in Wurtemberg, writing in 1603, asserts
that he had often tested the virtues of the emerald in cases of
dysentery and with invariable success.20
It
speaks not a little for the beauty of the emerald that so good a judge
of precious stones as Pliny should have pronounced this gem to be the
only one that delighted the eye without fatiguing it, adding that when
the*vision was wearied by gazing intently at other objects, it gained
renewed strength by viewing^an emerald. So general in the early
centuries of our era was the persuasion that
" Marbodus, 1. c, f. 48. 18Rueus, 1. c, p. 36.
"Morales, "De las piedras preciosas," Valladolid, 1604, f. 101. 20
Andreae Bacei, " De gernims et lapidibus pretiosis," Francofurti, 1603,
pp. 63, 64 (annotation of Gabelchover to his Latin version).
