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THE LAPIS LAZULI                          103
bunculus, a little coal, because when this beautiful variety of the " noble " garnet is held up between the eyes and the sun, it is no longer a deep, blood-red, but has exactly the appearance of a small piece of live or glowing coal, the scarlet portion of its colour-mixture being particularly evident. The ancient Greeks called it anthrax, which name is sometimes used in medicine to-day with reference to the severe boil-like inflammation which, from its burn­ing and redness, is called a carbuncle, though it is more usual to apply the word " anthrax" to the malignant cattle-disease which is occasionally passed on to man by means of wool, hair, blood-clots, etc., etc., and almost always ends fatally. A great deal of mystery and super­stition has always existed in connexion with this stone— the invisibility of the bearer of the egg-carbuncle laid by a goldfinch, for instance.
(F) The manganese-alumina garnet—
—is usually found in a crystalline or granular form, and mostly in granite and in the inter­stices of the plates, or lamina, of rocks called schist. One variety of this, which is a deep hyacinth in colour, though often of a brown-tinted red, is called " spessar-tine,"' or " spessartite," from the district in which it is chiefly found, though its distribution is a fairly wide one.
The Lapis-Lazuli.
The lapis-lazuli, sometimes called " azure stone," is almost always blue, though often containing streaks of white and gold colour, the latter of which are due to the presence of minute specks or veins of iron pyrites, the former and colourless streaks being due to free lime,