AMBER.
AMBER, once among the most prized of natural orna- ments, is again coming into fashion. Its praises are sung by the author of the " Tears of the Heliades," * in prose which gives a correct and not unduly enthusiastic account of the history of the substance in fancy and fashion. In a coloured plate of a necklace of Sicilian amber, with tints not only of yellow and orange but of iridescent greens, blues, and greys, he shows that some rare form of amber may really take the place of a " gem " when properly polished and set. Its beauty in a more concrete form may be seen in several of the leading jewellers' shops, where trinkets of the loveliest clouded yellow amber—cigarette-cases, powder- boxes, and other small and costly articles of minor jewellery —are set with turquoise, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires in bands of small stones, as evidence of the place in luxury which the amber may fill. It is difficult to understand why its beauties have been forgotten. It appealed to the sasthetic sense no less than to the imagination of the most primitive, and the most " decadent " of mortals, from the British chief who purchased it from traders over the sea, and had it buried in his tomb, to Nero, whose fleet brought back from the " Amber Shore " thirteen thousand pounds' weight for his .enjoyment, and who in his ode to Poppasa likened his wife's hair • to its golden tints. There is a wide range in the tints of .amber, and the Roman ladies who dyed their tresses in imitation may have taken any shade from ripe apricot to lemon colour. But in some aspect or another, fashion, fancy, religion, or medicine, amber has never failed to attract the West until recent days, when an imperfect imitation of 'Oriental feeling has devoted it mainly to the service of smoke. Its intrinsic merits are due at least as much to the .sense of touch as of sight. It is exquisitely light, and of a warm smoothness like no other substance. Its electric pro- perties heighten the feeling that this is no atone, but the organic substance nearest to the chilly sovereignty of the gem, and superior to the gem because, as Thales of Miletus said, "it has life." So Pytheas, seeking the Amber Shore, found Britain, and on the coast of Courland, and from the Helder to the Elbe, the amber fishery, and later, amber mining, have lasted from the founding of Olbia until to-day. And Pliny knew, though he did not express it scientifically, that amber has the same specific gravity as sea-water, and travels with the current when the storms break up the sub. marine substances. "It rolls along, and seems to hang in the water."
It is in the nature of a miracle that the amber forests have perished, or only survive as shapeless masses of carbon, while the balsam distilled from their branches remains perfect, in golden drops and honey-icicles. "Nothing but the straw and scum floats down the river of time," said the philosophers; "solid things perish or sink on the way." But the amber, though Pytheas said it was the scum of the "encrusted sea," is the essence of those perished forests, overflowing life-drops from the giant trees. The coal and lignite are mere organic evidence of the past. "Here," we say, "is coal,—here, then, was a prehistoric forest." It leaves on us no sense of a present in the past, few striking records of the shapes or forms of the dead world, not the faintest relic of an episode, not one vision of the play of life in those rolling ages of which it is the 'mute memorial. But the amber-drops that are the lively
• Tears of the Naiades: Labor as a Ginn. By W. A. Buffum. London s Sampson Low and Oa. records of the life of this dead world. In their transparent depths are enclosed the minute evidences of the days of the ancient amber-land, instantaneous photographs of incidents in the life of insects, of leaves and seeds, of events so in- significant as to weigh but as dust in the balance in the course of the world as it was, but strangely interesting to us looking back from the world as it is. Stories of forest-life beneath these trees are present in the amber, of incidents so slight that we,have as little right to expect their preservation as that of the sound of the wind in their branches,—moments of time measured by the falling of a drop, or by the beating of an insect's wing. Contrast this irreducible time-minimum of event with the immensity of the duration of the record of that event, and the attraction of the amber inclosures to the imagination may be in part explained. It is not only, as Bacon says, that "the Spider, Flye, and Ant, being tender dissipable substances, falling into Amber, are therein buryed, finding therein both a Death, and Tombe, pre- serving them better from corruption than a Buell Monu- ment ; " we also see the manner of their death, the nature of the falling amber, whether fluid, like water, or viscous, like honey, and the fly, extending its wings, and making an instinctive movement to fly as the drop engulfed it. We judge the season of the year from the freshness or decay of the inclosed leaves, or the feathers shed by a moulting bird. It is not enough that the fossil-resin has preserved the seeds, the cone-scales, and the tiniest leaflets of the forest ; it has inclosed the insects which fed upon the leaves, and the spiders and the webs of the spiders which fed upon the insects. Thus, in the collection of inclusa at South Kensington, a clear drop of dark, honey- coloured amber, incloses an insect on a tiny lanceolate-leaf. It resembles the cricket-like creatures found in long grass, the favourite prey of ground-spiders. The cricket was sitting on the leaf,—uttering, no doubt, a thankful chirrup before he began his breakfast, when the amber rain descended ; and there, like unhappy Ajax, sedet, xternumque sedebil, lifelike though entombed, a cricket, perhaps ten thousand years old, nourished on leaves of which that inclosed with him is the sole survivor of what were once as thick as those in Vallom- brosa. Next the cricket lies another of the midgets of the amber forest,—a tiny fly. It spread its wings as the drop fell, and before it could make the down-stroke of propulsion the liquid hardened and preserved it,—dead, but a " living picture" of the miocene fly in action. The fly has for neighbour a spider, overwhelmed by the same fate ; and, by a happy contrast or comparison of the ancient and the modern world, beside these venerable flies and spiders, amber-endowed with everlasting youth, are insects inclosed in the amber of to-day. It is not amber, but copal; shed not on the shores of the Baltic, but on the coast of Zanzibar. But it is amber in the making, not differing in appearance from the fossil gum ; clear and pale like frozen honey ; hard to the touch as amber. Yet it must have dropped from the trees like water, stiffening on the instant that it fell. For in the copal block is not one, or two, but a whole procession of imprisoned insects,—dead, it would seem, while engaged in some social duty. Perhaps it is merely a procession, but it looks like a locust funeral, or the dentenage- ment of an ant colony, in two lines, going and returning. Were they enclosed in Sicilian amber their value would be priceless in a Palermo shop, for the scene resembles exactly that universal "house-moving" of the poorer Italian families seen before Easter. It is a sgomberamento in amber. There were thirty kinds of pine in the amber forest, and we know this, and guess the proportion of this or that to the other trees by the fragments found in the fossil sap which has survived its parent forest. The most common of all was a " Tree of Life," which has left five times as many fragments preserved in the amber as has any other pine. But oaks and willows, beeches, poplar, birch and alder, and even a camphor tree, all flourished in the wood together, by the unimpeachable testimony of the amber museum. So, too, the entomologists and others have found a little preserve in what is known as the amber fauna. " Among the spiders is the remarkable genus Arches., which differs from the living species by the position of the eyes, by the extraordinarily large jaws, and by the bead, which is very distinctly separated from the breast. Some of the inseots unite in themselves characteristics of several families or orders now living, and present a form out of which, in the later de-
velopment of the animal world, two different forms proceeded. A feather proves that the amber forest contained birds, but of mammalia nothing has been found but a tuft of hair. Fishes and amphibious animals are also wanting. Frogs, lizards, and fishes are shown in amber, but they have been introduced by artificial means. Bubbles of air, and even drops of water, occur, and in Berendt's collection there was a spider, in the translucent body of which the movable air-bubble could be seen to shift its place at every turn given to the piece." The magic properties ascribed to amber were the natural result of its electric power. Yet this belief does not account for the wearing of a cube of amber by the Shahs of Persia as a protection against assassination, nor for its use as material for poison-detecting cups. In the former case the cube was said to have fallen from heaven ; in the latter its organic origin was thought to disclose the presence of mineral poisons, and its colour to change when vegetable drugs were present in the wine. Nor has the magic of amber any relation to Meinbold's striking tale of " The Amber Witch." The poor girl discovered a surface amber mine, and was able to make money enough to buy comforts for her father's house and to give to the poor of his parish. This was enough to rouse the suspicions of the horrible age when envy had always ready the terrible engine of the witchcraft trial. Those who can endure the perusal of these records of malignity may read them in " common form " in the pages of " The Amber Witch."
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