Cinnabar is also described by Theophrastus. The term _minium_ was applied to it also, till in consequence of the adulteration of cinnabar with _red lead_, the term minium came at last to be restricted to that preparation of lead. Theophrastus describes an artificial cinnabar, which came from the country above Ephesus. It was a shining red-coloured sand, which was collected and reduced to a fine powder by pounding it in vessels of stone. We do not know what it was. The native cinnabar was found in Spain, and was used chiefly as a paint. Dioscorides employs _minium_ as the name for what we at present call cinnabar, or bisulphuret of mercury. His cinnabar was a red paint from Africa, produced in such small quantity that painters could scarcely procure enough of it to answer their purposes. Mercury is described by Pliny as existing native in the mines of Spain, and Dioscorides gives the process for extracting it from cinnabar. It was employed in gilding precisely as it is by the moderns. Pliny was aware of its great specific gravity, and of the readiness with which it dissolves gold. The amalgam was squeezed through leather, which separated most of the quicksilver. When the solid amalgam remaining was heated, the mercury was driven off and pure gold remained. It is obvious from what Dioscorides says, that the properties of mercury were very imperfectly known to him. He says that it may be kept in vessels of glass, or of lead, or of tin, or of silver.[61] Now it is well known that it dissolves lead, tin, and silver with so much rapidity, that vessels of these metals, were mercury put into them, would be speedily destroyed. Pliny’s account of quicksilver is rather obscure. It seems doubtful whether he was aware that native _argentum vivum_ and the _hydrargyrum_ extracted from cinnabar were the same. [61] Lib. v. c. 110. Cinnabar was occasionally used as an external medicine; but Pliny disapproves of it, assuring his readers that quicksilver and all its preparations are virulent poisons. No other mercurial preparations except cinnabar and the amalgam of mercury seem to have been known to the ancients.[62] [62] The ancients were in the habit of extracting mercury from cinnabar, by a kind of imperfect distillation. The native mercury they called _argentum vivum_, that from cinnabar _hydrargyrus_. See Plinii Hist. Nat. xxxiii. 8. 9. The ancients were unacquainted with the metal to which we at present give the name of _antimony_; but several of the ores of that metal, and of the products of these ores were not altogether unknown to them. From the account of stimmi and stibium, by Dioscorides[63] and Pliny,[64] there can be little doubt that these names were applied to the mineral now called _sulphuret of antimony_ or crude antimony. It is found most commonly, Pliny says, among the ores of silver, and consists of two kinds, the male and the female; the latter of which is most valued. [63] Lib. v. c. 99. [64] Lib. xxxiii. c. 6.