reason may be considered, like other varieties of fossil resin, of which it is the most important, as an appendix to minerals."
Archaeological
discoveries reveal that amber was known to and favoured by prehistoric
peoples, such as the Egyptians and cave-dwellers of Switzerland. Amber
is believed to have been taken from the Baltic by the seafaring
Phoenicians, and the old Greeks called it elektron, from whence comes our modern word electricity.
True amber—Succinum eleetrum (Dana)
— the succinite of mineralogists, is the resin of a coniferous tree
which was of the vegetable life of the Miocene age of the Tertiary
period in geology. The late Professor Goeppert, of Bres-lau christened
the principal amber-yielding tree the Pinites succinifer. The
vegetable origin of amber has not been definitely established in
science, but one of the evidences that it was a flowing vegetable
resin, that is accepted as indisputable, is the oft-occurring presence
in amber of insects, or parts of them, which must have been caught and
imprisoned when the fresh resin was fluent. Wherever amber is found in
the earth, it is in association with brown-coal or lignite.
Amber, or succinite, then, is a fossil resin
