Digging for amber is a favourite pursuit of the peasantry; and though in many cases it proves unsuccessful, yet sometimes it is highly remunerative. Near the village Kowall, a few miles from Dantzig, avenues of trees were planted a few years back along the high road. On digging one of the holes destined for their reception, a rich amber nest was found. Favourable signs induced the landowner to persevere in digging, and at length, at a depth of about thirty feet, such rich deposits of amber were found as enabled him to pay off all the mortgages on his estate.
The territories where amber is found extend over Pomerania and East and West Prussia, as far as Lithuania and Poland, but chiefly in the former provinces, where it is found almost uniformly in separate nodules in the sand, clay, or fragments of lignite of the upper tertiary and alluvial formations. It also occurs in the beds of streams, and in the sand-banks of rivers. How far its seat may extend under the Baltic is of course unknown. Amber is likewise met with on the coast of Denmark and Sweden, in Gallicia and Moravia, near Christiania in Norway, and in Switzerland, near Basle. It is occasionally found in the gravel-pits near London, and specimens have been dug up in Hyde Park. At Aldborough, after a raking tide, it is thrown on the beach in considerable quantities, along with masses of jet.
On the Sicilian coast, near the mouth of the River Giaretta, many pieces of a peculiar blue tinge are collected and sent to Catania to be cut and polished.
Single pieces and even large deposits of amber are said to have been discovered on the coasts of the Caspian Sea, in Siberia, Kamtschatka, and China, in North America and Madagascar. These accounts, however, require confirmation, as several other fossil or non-fossil resinous substances so strongly resemble amber as to have deceived even well-informed naturalists.
What is this substance, and how has it been produced? There is now no longer any doubt that, like other vegetable resins, it has been secreted by trees which have long since disappeared from the surface of the earth, but once formed extensive forests on the islands or shores of the vast sea which at that time covered the plains of Northern Europe as far as the foot of the Ouralian chain.
How those islands disappeared, and how those primeval forests came to be buried under land and sea, becomes apparent from the changes that have taken place in the South Baltic lands since the last two thousand years in consequence of partial upheavings and subsidences. According to the oldest Prussian chronicler, Peter of Duesburg, whose narrative begins with the year 1226, the waves of the Baltic at that time reached as far as the present town of Kulm, and a century later vessels sailed as far as Thorn. The present delta of the Vistula was a shallow morass, dotted here and there with a flat island, and continued in that state until towards the end of the thirteenth century, when dykes, raised by the industry of man, prevented the constantly recurring inundations of the river, and converted gloomy swamps into fertile meadows.
In other parts we find the sea incroaching upon the land. Since the times of the Teutonic Order a whole province between Pillau and Balga has been submerged by the floods of the Frische Haff; and the first Christian church in Prussia, originally built five miles from the sea, now stands close to the shore. Dense fir-forests rose in gloomy monotony, but a thousand years back, where now the Baltic rolls its waters; and where at that time ships lay at anchor we now find hillocks of sand. After such changes in comparatively so short a time, we cannot wonder that the islands of the amber period should have been replaced by other lands and another sea.
We are indebted for the first accurate observations on the nature of the amber-tree to Professor Goeppert, who proved, by the microscopical examination of the cells of fossil pieces of wood that were veined or streaked with amber, and thus evidently had secreted the resin, that they proceeded from several coniferæ, belonging to the extinct genus Pinites.
In many of our pines and firs we frequently find between the annual rings crevices or interstices filled with resinous matter, but far less abundantly than in the amber-trees. The only existing coniferous plant that can in any way be compared to them is the Dammara australis, of New Zealand, at the base of whose trunk masses of resin, weighing twenty or thirty pounds, are frequently found. In Brazil Von Martius often saw similar lumps at the foot of the copal-tree, which dropping from the trunk had collected in considerable masses between the roots, thus showing that the large rounded or globular pieces of amber must have been formed in the same manner, while the thin and flat straight or cupuliform pieces were moulded upon the rind, or between the annual rings of the tree.
When we consider the abundant secretion of the amber-trees, and the numberless ages during which they may have flourished, we cannot wonder that, since the oldest historic times, every violent storm which stirs up the ancient forest-grounds at the bottom of the Baltic casts the valuable fossil ashore, and that in all probability future generations will still be able to collect it in undiminished quantities.