the view was even finer than that from the opposite side, for the banks of wood were richer and deeper in extent; and towards the source of the upper Belbec, where the French outposts were then stationed, the ridges of hills stretched further away into blue distance. Winding along, but still ever ascending, we at last reached what had been a huge barrier of rock stretched completely across the path. At the time, however, of making the new road, the rock was cut away, and an archway of hewn limestone, adorned with Doric columns, was erected in its place. Here was stationed a guard of French soldiers, who, the gateway being partially blocked up for military purposes, assisted us in getting our baggage horses through the narrow opening. We were now in the Phoros pass, on the crest of the mountain ridge which separates the southern coast from the interior valleys and steppes. Wonderful indeed was the scene that burst upon our view. Behind us lay the peaceful and fertile valley we had lately crossed, green as an emerald, in a setting of grey mountains and wooded hills, which threw their long shadows across, and whose recesses gleamed with the mysterious purple tinge of the opal. Around us were huge pinnacles of rugged grey limestone, partially clad with stunted oak, hazel, and thorns, cropped by the fierce blast which in winter time sweeps over the sea, and breaks upon the towering cliff. Before us, three thousand feet beneath, though little more than a mile distant, lay the calm blue ocean stretching far away till blended with the blue sky above. Wild precipices of rock, on the ledges of which grew small stunted pines, rose up over a thousand feet from sloping masses of underwood and débris of all sizes from the cliffs, from huge rocks as large as a cottage, to the sand and gravel washed down by the rains. Here only, where the road pierced through, was there a rent in this mighty cliff, and down the steep sloping bank it was skilfully carried, by an innumerable series of zig-zags. Huge masses of rock and clay had, during the last two winters, become detached from the mass above, and coming

thundering down like an avalanche, had in many places carried off large portions of the road in their headlong career. At length we reached the foot of the cliff, where the road turns to the eastward, and continues along the southern coast as far as the town of Aloushta. We were still an immense height above the sea, along the shores of which a few white cottages and villas peeped out among a rich, luxuriant foliage. Above, on our left hand, rose the cold grey precipice, like the wall of some gigantic castle peaked and turreted, throwing, as the sun was getting low in the horizon, one vast black shadow over the road and adjacent slopes. Winding along, now amidst thickets of thorns and hornbeam, overspread with masses of clematis, sometimes hanging like graceful drapery from their boughs, sometimes forming arbours of impenetrable gloom, now right in at the foot of the cliff, the top of which is so high and so straight above your head that you cannot see it, now amidst huge boulders and shelving masses of shingle, which ages had worn away from the rocks above, we continued for some miles without meeting a human creature or passing a single habitation. At each turn of the road some new peak would come into view on our left, and on our right a fresh promontory, on which was situated some deserted villa, would jut out into the sea. It was a scene altogether of indescribable grandeur. traveller became silent and spellbound, full of awe and reverence. All was still; even the plashing of the waves on the rock-bound shore did not reach our ears; the evening was calm, there were no voices to break the solitude. The ruthless Cossacks had doubtless swept through the district, and had turned the farms and villas into desolation and destruction. I doubted whether we should meet with any living creature to break the solitary grandeur of this silence. I cast up my eyes to the savage pile, and saw two huge eagles hovering with outstretched wings a thousand feet above me. They added to the solitude rather than took away from it.

The

H. F. V.

AVING spoken of rings synthe

tically, or in their settings, it is our purpose in the present, as it will be in some subsequent notices, to consider them analytically, glancing in quick succession, firstly, at some of the large stones with which the bezils were embellished; and, secondly, at the different metals which formed in the great majority of cases the anular hoop; before proceeding to which details, however, a few words of passing comment seem due to certain very costly substances -for the most part mineral-which, though seldom fabricated into rings, were not unfrequently wrought up into ornaments for the person, or else elaborated into superb vases to deck the sideboards of the wealthy.

Very conspicuous among these stands Myrrlia, whilome to modern ears a mere word received from the Old by the New World, with all its traditional honours, in implicit faith, as expressive of something exceedingly rich, beautiful, and precious, yet till quite lately, as little more than an abstraction to most readers of the classics, to whom it conveyed no definite mineralogical or other meaning whatever. To Corsi is due the credit of having at length, after able research, succeeded in clearly identifying this mineral, though the identification, it must be confessed, has robbed Myrrha of much of her ancient glory, so that she must henceforth be contentunlike that lady in Garth's Dispensary, who lost a substance to preserve a name'-to merge a mere nominal valuation for the sake of a reputation, which is substantial at least, if not splendid.

VOL. LIV. NO. CCCXXII.

6

Long and keenly had the Myrrhine controversy been carried on by scholars and antiquaries, before Corsi wrote; and numerous and curious were the different speculations to which it gave rise. Bellonius, misled by some morbid condition of his retina and tympanum to perceive a striking similarity between Murra and Murex, imagined Myrrhine' vases to have been made of some species-though he prudently forbears to decide which of large univalve shells. Cardinal Baronio, with better pretensions to an ear perhaps, but certainly with even a less glimmer of judgment, proposes as his Eureka, in his Ecclesiastical Annals, that 'since the words Myrrha and myrrh are spelt and pronounced the same, the two things must be the same, especially, as Pliny reports of the first, what we all know to be true of the second, viz.:-that it emits a pleasant odour when heated. Encouraged by such lively etymological precedents, new 'Guessers at Truth' guessed again. With one, myrrha became a pudding stone, of hybrid cornelians embedded in white quartz, ('a common mineral in China,' says Guibert); with another, (Boetius de Boot) it was the same as 'the agate called onyx;' with a third (Valmont de Bomare) it was the dark vitreous obsidian stone; with a fourth (Monges), it was a variety of chalcedony. Many, among whom was the illustrious Winckelman, considered it to be a name given to sliced sardonyx; Valthiem fixed upon the unctuous Chinese larditis, or image stone, as its representative; Cardan and

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Julius Cæsar Scaliger, made it out to their own satisfaction to be porcelain; Prince Paterno took a different view, and believed that Myrrha was a name given to vases composed of many various substances, which, when the vessel was small, was made of amber, when somewhat larger, of agate, when of considerable dimensions, of sardonyx, and when larger still, of alabaster; finally, writes Corsi, from whom we abridged these Somnia DoctorumFrederick Ehregot, the most full and copious author on the subject, after treating all the above opinions as chimerical, and showing little moderation to any of his predecessors, getting quite into a passion with Julius Cæsar lo Scaligero, difensore della porcellana, becomes very diffuse at last, and leaves the question just where he found it.

have

As all these notiuncles of virtuosi and scholars were equally unsupported, it required no great amount of sagacity, with Pliny in hand, for any one who would take the trouble, to convince himself of the fallacy of each in succession. Corsi, however, went beyond this; in his excellent work on ancient stones, unlike the author last cited, he pulls down in order to edify, establishing from a careful collation of whatever notices have been left to us by the ancients, about myrrha, with the only mineral substance with which they all agree, the interesting, and on a primâ facie view, the not very likely conclusion, that this marvel of antiquity, which has been more bepraised than any other object of luxury and virtù, was after all, in reality, nothing more exquisite or recherché than our common Derbyshire or fluor-spath.

The only objections to this identification of myrrha with fluor spath are, firstly, that Pliny asserts the former to be odoriferous, while the Derbyshire crystal is not so. It appears, however, that for the perception of the odour it was necessary to heat the mineral,

Si calidum potas, ardenti murrha Falerno, Convenit, et melior fit sapor inde mero, (Mart.)

surface, to prevent it chipping, and as the ancients must have proceeded here in the same way that we do, the probability is, that the Carmanians, on whose border lay the land of myrrh and frankincense, used some such resinous substance, designedly fragrant, to perfume their crystal vases, and thus to enhance their value. The second ob jection, founded on a line of Propertius,

Seu que palmiferæ mittunt venalia
Theba,
Murrheaque in Parthis pocula cocta
focis,

seems, at first sight, more intrac tible. Tournebius indeed gives a new tournure to the line by reading pocla coacta suis, which, being inadmissible, it only remains to suppose that Propertius, who was in professor of mineralogy; who lived the first place a poet, and not a

too near the time of the introduction of the first batch-which were all dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinusto have been likely to see many probably acquainted with those genuine specimens; and who was vasa vitrer atque murrhina quæ in urbe Diaspoli elaborabantur, of which Arrian speaks, refers in the line above cited to some vitreous importations from that source; at all events it is certain, from a passage in Paulus, a Roman Jurisconsult, that real myrrhine vessels were not cocta focis, either in the sense of being fused as glass, or baked as clay; to the interrogatory as to what might in Roman law constitute the supellectile of a house, the interpreter of that law answers as follows; vitrea vasa escaria et fictilia, nec solum vulgaria, sed potoria in supellectili sunt, sicut etiam quæ pretio magno sunt. De murrhinis et crystallinis dubitari potest an debeant adnumerari in supellectili propter eximium usum et pretium; sed et de his idem dicendum est.'

and as Corsi instructs us, that before working, it is necessary to melt some kind of resin over the heated

Pompey, who first introduced this luxury into Rome, presented it to his admiring countrymen, both in its unwrought state, and also made up into bowls (Pompeius primum in urbem murrhina invexit lapides et pocula). That it was not properly a gem, as some have supposed, from its occurrence in the book of Pliny devoted to gems, is plain from the size there assigned to ordinary specimens, which were sufficiently large to be elaborated into drinkingvessels; while to drink out of a gem is a privilege that has never yet been ceded to mortal lips, except indeed in poetry.* The Roman naturalist mentions this substance, together with crystal and amber, at the beginning of his book, De Gemmis, probably because their beauty and costliness rendered them worthy of a place next to precious stones, and also a suitable introduction to them. We learn from the same passage that murrha' was a semiopaque mineral,† characterized by a brilliant assemblage of different colours, which colours blended with and ran into each other, velut per transitum; also that, though smooth on the surface, it looked cloudy and verrucose within; that it contained salts foreign to itself; that its hues shifted with its change of position; and that vessels formed of

423

it presented a beautiful iridescence on the extreme margin: in all of which particulars it resembles fluor spath. That it was a heavy mineral we gather from Statius:

hic pocula magna

Prima duci, murrasque graves, crystallaque portat;

which statement accords perfectly with an observation of Brongniart respecting fluor spath-viz., that it is full one-third heavier than either

agate or crystal, of which the anpally made; and that this is very cient vasa potoria were principerceptible if we take up together two cups of the same size, one of crystal or agate, the other of fluor spath, and weigh them in opposite hands. Finally, some magnificent specimens of fluorspath have actually within a few years been disinterred in and about the neighbourhood of Old Rome.§

TURQUOISE CALLAIS.

All the world is familiar with turquoises. There is scarce a commoner in the land whose wife or sister does not wear a turquoise ring. Haply at this moment the owner of some fair turquoised finger, which till now was turning listlessly over this paper on gems, has had her eye and her attention suddenly interested on seeing the

* Ut gemma bibat.- Virg.

well-known name of that anular circlet of dainty blue which decks her pretty pronubus, and hopes now to rise yet more blue from our perusal. May she not look blue upon us, if, in giving her the information sought, we should unavoidably destroy the long-cherished pleasing delusion, that she is wearing gems. Those turquoises, dear madam (suffer the familiar compellation from a kind old gentleman extremely loth to give you pain), those turquoises of yours (for there are two sorts) are not gems, nor otherwise precious than as rendered so by your endorsing them on your finger, being, in fact, nothing better than little bits of ancient osteology, copper dyed, and, according to the highest price' ever given 'for old bones,' of small value. In saying they are coloured by copper, we follow the prevailing, but not universal, opinion of mineralogists, among whom Corsi, for instance, states that the cerulean hue is produced by contact of the bony matter with the phosphate of iron. turchina ossia, quella chiamata della nuova roccia,* ha per principio colorante il fosfato di ferro.' This

La

opinion, however, is not only at variance with that commonly entertained, but is opposed to the testimony furnished by Hill's unimpeachable experiments.

I know (writes this accomplished mineralogist and chemist in his Annotations on Theophrastus)—I know that the turquoise owes its colour to copper exclusively. I have been able to divest it of this; to precipitate and preserve

the bone acquired the green hue of the turquoises found in some parts of Germany and elsewhere, and that if the cupreous particles were dis solved in a proper alkaline menstruum, they converted the bone and teeth submitted to their action into the more common blue turquoise.

The same careful observer remarks, in reference to factitious turquoises generally, that

The colour will sometimes flow equally through their entire substance; at others, that it is confined to spots, where the blue lies concentrated and very deep, when the application of heat will in such cases disperse the colour, diffusing it everywhere through the mass equally, making it as palely, beautifully, and uniformly blue as it is in native turquoises.

Should any turquoised belle feel disappointed at learning the low market price of her blue fingerornaments, and aggrieved at our disclosure as indiscreet, we hope she will consider it some amends at least on our part to have instructed her from an adept how to make her own trinkets; and if she will follow the accomplished author's simple manipulations as given above, we venture to predict she will derive a pleasure in this manufactory, equal at least to that she may formerly have experienced in zealously prosecuting those ornamental and useful arts of japanning cabinets and teaboards, transferring church bronze scrolls and legends on paper, making and colouring bread-seals, sitting down to a long morning's Poonah

to prove it, by the effects of different menstruums, to be absolute copper; and further, by experiments founded on this process, I have succeeded in giving (by a solution of copper in a volatile alkali) the true turquoise colour to the substance of the native turquoises, and to make by that means those factitious turquoises which, put before a judicious assembly to the severest tests, gave all the marks of the real.

He prosecuted these experiments still further, till at length he could make both green and blue turquoises at will; finding that by the employment of a suitable acid menstruum,

chomanie. Further to deprecate the displeasure of any damsel or dame who, under a false impression, may hitherto have worn turquoises, we copy the following commendation of them from Pliny: Though all the grace which the prettiest of them those, namely, which ap proach the grass-green of emeralds - possess, seemeth to come from outward show, howbeit being set in gold they look most beautiful, neither is there any precious stone that becometh gold better;' nor, he might have added, that becometh better