Writings About the Virtues of Precious Stones

In the latter part of the thirteenth century, Marco Polo relates that the inhabitants of Zipangu, in the Indian Seas, had certain stones of a charmed virtue inserted between the skin and the flesh of their right arms, which through the power of diabolical enchantments rendered them invulnerable.

The miraculous virtues of precious stones are alluded to by Chaucer, in his "Romaunt de la Rose," and he refers, in "The House of Fame," to the treatise on gems called "The Lapidary," renowned at that time:-

"And thei were sett as thicke of onchis

Five of the finest stories faire

That men redin in the Lapidaire."

The book here mentioned is, probably, that mentioned by Montfaucon as in the Library at Paris, "Le Lapidaire de la Vertu des Pierres."

Gower, whose birth is supposed to have been about 1320, in his "Confessio Amantis" (first printed in 1483), gives a description of the chariot and crown of the sun, in which the Arabian ideas respecting precious stones are interwoven with Ovid's fictions and the classical mythology:-

"Of golde glistrende spoke and whele

The Sonne his carte hath, faire and wele;

In which he sit, and is croned

With bright stones environed;

Of which if that I speke shall

There be tofore in speciall,

Set in the front of his corone,

Thre stones, which no persone

Hath upon erth; and the first is

By name cleped Leucachatis;

The other two cleped thus,

Astroites and Ceraunus,

In his corone; and also byhynde,

By olde bokes, as I fynd,

There ben of worthy stones three,

Set eche of hem in his degree;

Whereof a Cristelle is that one,

Which that corone is sett upon;

The second is an Adamant;

The third is noble and avenant,

Which cleped is Idriades-

And over this yet natheless,

Upon the sidis of the werke,

After the writynge of the clerke,

There sitten five stones mo;

The Smaragdine is one of tho,

Jaspis, and Helitropius,

And Vandides and Jacinctus.

Lo ! thus the corone is beset