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COMMENTARY
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26. chrysocolla. This is mentioned again in sections 39, 40, and 51 as an ore or mineral found in mines. Though Theophrastus does not describe it anywhere, his repeated allusion to its occurrence in copper mines clearly indicates that it was a copper mineral. Later writers also mention that it occurred in gold mines, and some of them say tliat it was found in mines containing other metals; but this occurrence was evidently due to the presence of copper minerals in such mines, as is explicitly stated by Isidorus.131 In section 39 chrysocolla is said to occur in native kyanos, which was azurite, the blue copper carbonate, showing clearly that chrysokplla in this case was malachite, the green copper carbonate.132 The kind of chrysokplla mentioned in this treatise evidently corresponds to the natural kind of chrysocolla mentioned by Pliny133 as an exudation or incrustation found in mines. Dioscorides134 states that the best kind of chrysokplla was of a leek-green color. The descriptions given by ancient writers show that the name chrysokplla or chrysocolla, referring to a natural product, was given to any bright-green copper mineral that occurred as an earthy incrustation. From this it follows that the name must have denoted malachite, green copper carbonate, when it was in an earthy form, and also the amorphous green copper silicate which is still called chrysocolla at the present time. However, the descriptions of Pliny135 indicate that chrysocolla as the name of a mineral was more often applied to malachite than to what is now called chrysocolla. From its peculiar name, which means "gold glue," some scholars136 have erroneously concluded that the chrysocolla of the ancients was borax or some other soldering flux, though there is no basis for this conclusion other than the name and the stated use of the material. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries borax was frequently called "chrysocolla," and this circumstance may have caused the wrong identification. The name was first given to borax by Agricola,137 who may have misunderstood its meaning.
131 XIX, 17, 10. "2 See also the notes on sec. 39. 133 XXXIII, 86.
134 V, 104 (Wellmann ed., V, 89). 135 XXXIII, 86.
136 E.g., F. Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie (Paris, 1866-1869), Vol. I, p. 173; Vol. II, p. 401; Lewis and Short, Harper's Latin Dictionary, s.v. But compare the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, s.v. Metallum ("Malachit") praecipue ad ferruminandum usurpatum.
137 G. Agricola, De Natura Fossilium (Basel, 1558), p. 206.
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