Cypro inventum ex dimidia parte smaragdum, ex dimidia iaspidem, nondum umore in totum transfigurato. Here the Latin umore reproduces the Greek τον νΒατος, which can be translated as "the watery state" or "its watery state." The sense of the passage seems to be that a piece of stone or a crystal was once found in Cyprus half of which had the green color of smaragdos, while the other half had a limpid or watery appearance and was probably colorless or only slightly colored. This could have been green quartz in a matrix of clear colorless quartz or colorless chalcedony, though it seems rather more likely that the allusion is to a crystal. Crystals of this sort are not uncommon. Tourmaline frequently occurs in the form of transparent crystals that sometimes are green at one end and have a different color or are colorless at the other end. It is easy to see how mineral occurrences of this kind would lead to the idea that one sort of precious stone could originate from another. Many later writers on mineralogy advance this idea, though Theophrastus was the first to express it.
28. lyngourion. This substance is also mentioned by other ancient authors such as Strabo,156 Dioscorides,157 and Pliny.158 Though many commentators have tried to identify it, unfortunately they have disagreed in their conclusions. Some have thought that it was a fossilized animal substance, others that it was a particular kind of precious or semiprecious stone, others that it was amber, and still others that it was a kind of fossil resin resembling amber.
Some early modern writers on mineralogy identified this substance as belemnite, fossil cuttlefish bone. De Boodt159 gives lyncurius as a synonym for belemnite, and later writers such as Woodward180 definitely identify the lyngourion or lyncurium of the ancients in this way. However, as Hill,161 Watson,162 and Beckmann163 have clearly pointed out, it could not possibly have been
156IV, 6, 2. 157II, ioo (Wellmann ed., II, 8i, 3). i5» XXXVII, 52.
158 A. B. De Boodt, Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia (Leyden, 1647), p. 476.
160 Cited by Hill, Theophrastus"! History of Stones, p. 73.
161 Ibid., p. 74.
162 W. Watson, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, LI (1759),
396.
163 J. Beckmann, History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins (London, 1846), Vol. I, p. 86.
