Amber, ivory, and cyanus, or ultramarine-enamel, are the only non-metallic precious substances with which Homer shows himself familiar. Precious stones of all kinds lay apparently outside his sphere of cognisance. Mother of pearl, coral, and rock crystal are equally strange to him. He takes no notice of the engraved gems of Mycenæ, no more than of the porphyry, agate, onyx, and alabaster, there variously employed to diversify the framework of life. No distinctions are made in his verses between one kind of stone and another. White jade, brought from the furthest confines of Asia, though in some request at Hissarlik, may not have struck him as essentially different from any vulgar piece of flint picked up by the shore of the Hellespont. Or, if it did, his vocabulary was too scanty to allow of his expressing the sentiment. Homeric mineralogy thus embraced exceedingly few species. PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ On page 236 there was a footnote for “_Blümner, Technologie der Gewerbe_” but there was no anchor in the text. Those pages in Blümner are a description to the use of silver in antiquity, so the anchor was attached to the word “silver” in the text. ○ On page 255 the footnote for “Lepsius, _Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes_” is missing a page number, but page 52 contains hieroglyphics referring to iron. See Google Books for scans of the pages. ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_); text that was bold by “equal” signs (=bold=). ○ The use of a caret (^) before a letter, or letters, shows that the following letter or letters was intended to be a superscript, as in S^t Bartholomew or 10^{th} Century.