In the Catalogue of the collection of natural curiosities belonging to Paul Hermann, which were sold at Leyden in June 1711, I find, among the precious stones, _Chrysolithus Turmale Zeylon_. Though no description is added, it cannot be doubted that our tourmaline is meant. From this however we learn that the name together with the stone came to us from Ceylon, as Watson has remarked. We learn further, that the stone was at first considered as a chrysolite, and perhaps it may be mentioned under this name in the old accounts of Ceylon. Hermann, whose service to botany is well known, was in that island from 1670 to 1677; and it might be presumed, from his spirit of inquiry, that, had he known this stone, he would somewhere or other in his works have taken notice of its properties: but I find no mention of it either in his Cynosura Materiæ Medicæ, or in Musæum Zeylonicum. In the year 1719 the Academy of Sciences at Paris announced in their memoirs for 1717, that in the latter year M. Lemery had laid before them a stone found in a river in the island of Ceylon, which attracted and repelled light bodies[221]. It is there called a small magnet, though some difference between the two stones was admitted; but the German naturalist before-mentioned, denies that the tourmaline is endowed with magnetic virtue. It is however very remarkable, that though it is said, in the Memoirs of the Academy, that it has the power of attracting and repelling, no mention is made that it acquires that property, only after it has been heated, which is expressly remarked by the German. Those therefore who wish to ascribe to the ancients a knowledge of the tourmaline may say, If the editor of the Memoirs of the French Academy could forget this circumstance, is it not highly probable that Theophrastus might have forgot it in describing the lyncurium; Pliny, in describing the carbuncle; and Serapion, in describing his hyacinth? After this period the tourmaline must have been very scarce in Europe; for when Muschenbroek made his well-known experiments with the loadstone, and spared no labour to carry them to the utmost extent, he was not acquainted with the nature of the tourmaline, which, according to the account given of it by the Academy at Paris, he considered as a magnet, as he himself says in the preface to his first dissertation, published in 1724.