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234 THE MAGIC OP JEWELS AND CHARMS
water
to boil when immersed, it actually has the property of strongly
adhering to the tongue, and when put into water emits rapid streams of
minute bubbles of air. It has a strong siliceous odor, but after
absorbing an equal bulk of water becomes transparent like a Colorado
hydrophane described by the writer several years ago before the New York Academy of Sciences.
Although
tabasheer is mentioned in nearly all the textbooks, very little of it
has reached the United States. It is highly interesting, since we have
here an organic product scarcely to be distinguished from a similar
opal-like body found by Mr. Arnold Hague in the geysers of the
Yellowstone Park. Both tabasheer and the hydrophane were probably
what was called "Oculus Beli," "Oculus Mundi," and "Lapis mutabilis" by
Thomas Nicol, Robert Boyle, and other writers of the seventeenth
century, and "Weltauge" by the Germans.
The
great capacity of this substance for absorbing a fluid would
undoubtedly render it as efficacious for the purpose of absorbing
poison as any other known stone, providing the wound were open enough ;
and its internal use to-day as a medicine is possibly also due to this
property.
Tabasheer,
as known among mineralogists, is a corruption of the word tabixir, a
name which was used even in the time of Avicenna, the Grand Vizier and
body surgeon of the Sultan of Persia in the tenth century. It played a
very important part in medicine during the Middle Ages. As to its
origin, Sir David Brewster59 says that tabasheer is only formed in diseased or injured bamboo joints or stalks.
Guibourt60 differs from Brewster, inasmuch as he attributes the different rates of growth to the fact that when
*
Edinburgh Philos. Journal, No. 1, p. 147 ; Philos. Trans., cix, p. 283
; and " The Natural History and Properties of Tabersheer," 1828 ;
Edinburgh Journal, viii, p. 288.
"Jour, de Pharmacies, xxvii, pp. 81, 161, 252; and Phil. Mag., x, p. 220.
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