386 CURIOUS LORE OF PRECIOUS STONES
Sanskrit
medical literature as represented by Naha-rari, a physician of
Cashmere, who wrote in the thirteenth century, finds in the ruby a
valuable remedy for flatulency and biliousness. Moreover, aside from
these special uses, an elixir of great potency could be made from
rubies by those who properly understood the employment of precious
stones in the compounding of medicines.31 This famous "ruby
elixir" may have had little in common with the stone except its color,
as such remedies were generally said to have been made by some secret
and mysterious process, in the course of which all material evidence of
the presence of any precious stone or stones completely disappeared.
One
of the earliest specimens of English literature, William Langley's
"Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman (written about 1377),
contains a mention of the sapphire as a cure for disease :32
I
looked on my left naif as t>e lady me taughte And was war of a woman
wortheli yeclothed, Purfiled with pelure ** J>e finest vpon erthe,
Y-crowned with a corone £e kyng hath none better. Fetislieh" hir
fyngres were fretted " with gold wyre,
"Garbe, "Die indische Mineralien"; Naharari's " Rajanighantu," Varga XIII, Leipzig, 1882, p. 70.
" The
Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, by William Langley (or
Langland). Ed. by Rev. Walter W. Skeat, Oxford, 1881, p. 16. Passus II,
lines 8-15.
33 Trimmed with fur.
I
34 Handsomely. °° Adorned.
