[290] Pliny, xxxiii. 27. The solder (χρυσός and κόλλα, glue, or κόλλησις) is attributed by Herod. (i. 25) to Glaucus of Chios, a contemporary of Alyattes. The word kóllesis is variously rendered ‘soldering,’ ‘brazing,’ ‘welding,’ and ‘inlaying.’ Kóllesis was used to agglutinate metals, and treated with a peculiar alkali (Pliny, xxxiii. 24). The ‘gold glue’ (chrysocolla) is usually understood to be a hydrosilicate of copper; not to be confounded with the χρυσόκολλα or borax. The Mycenian goldsmiths soldered with the help of borax (borate of soda): Professor Landerer, of Athens, found this salt on an old medal from Ægina. It was called in the Middle Ages, Borax Venetus, because imported by the Venetians from Persia; and it is the Tinkal of modern India. According to Pliny, lead cannot be soldered without tin, or tin without lead, and oil invariably must be used. Later usage substituted for the latter colophonium and other resins: we now solder by means of electricity. The same writer makes Nero use chrysocolla-powder (a siliceous carbonate of copper, a kind of blue-stone which would turn green by exposure to damp) for strewing the circus, to give the course the colour of his favourite faction, the Prasine (green).
[291] The Germans, who delight in German derivatives for European words, would find leiton, &c., not in luteum, but in löthen = to unite. There is little doubt, however, that the first English manufactory of calamine brass at Esher, in Surrey, was set up in the seventeenth century by Demetrius, a German. In Grimm’s Dictionary, as noticed by Demmin (chap. i), bronze is erroneously called messing (brass).
[292] Derived from ὄρος, οὖρος (mountain), or from Ὀρείος, the discoverer. Metallic names in Greek are mostly masculine; in Latin and modern usage, neutral. Oreichalcum or aurichalcum, a hybrid word, became aurochalcum in the ninth century: the last corruption (middle of the sixteenth century) was archal.
[293] De l’Orichalque. J. P. Rossignol (loc. cit.).
[294] Some translate this word ‘yellow frankincense’ (λίβανος) colour; others derive it from Λίβανος, the Lebanon, and make it male, argurolibanus, while leucolibanus (white) was female. Finally, the word was explained by the old interpreters to be = ὀρείχαλκος = brass of Mount (Lebanon).
[295] The tradition of Atlantis, a middle-land in the Atlantic, has strong claims to our acceptance. The identity of the site with the ‘Dolphin’s Ridge,’ a volcanic formation, and the shallows noted by H.M.S. ‘Challenger,’ have been ably pleaded in Atlantis (Ignatius Donnelly; London: Sampson Low, 1882). Perhaps we may trace the vestiges in Saint Paul’s Rocks, the remarkable group of rocky islets situate in the equatorial mid-Atlantic. Mr. Darwin supposed the group to be an isolated example of non-volcanic oceanic insularity; but Prof. Renard finds the ‘balance of proof decidedly in favour of the volcanic origin of the rock.’ It will be remembered that Atlantis was dismembered by earthquakes, eruptions, and subsidence.
[296] Quoted by Percy from Watson’s Chemical Essays (iv. p. 85, 1786).
[297] The artificial mixture of copper (four fifths) and gold (one-fifth) was called pyropus (Pliny, xxxiv. 2), from its fiery red tint; it was also made of gold and bronze, and termed chrysochalcos, ‘the king of metals.’ Æs corinthiacum (Pliny, xxxiv. 3), or Corinthian brass, used for mirrors, composed of copper, silver (steel? zinc?), and gold, was more valuable than gold. According to Pausanias (ii. 3, § 3), this malleable and ductile metal was tempered in the Fountain of Pyrene. The vulgar legend, refuted by Pliny, who tells the tale (xxxiv. 6), dates it from the days of Mummius (b.c. 146). A medal of Corinthian brass was analysed by the Duc de Luynes. Pliny (xxxiv. 3) mentions three kinds, candidum, luteum, and hepatizon (liver-colour), of equal quantities of metal; this probably resembled our own alloys. Beckmann (sub voc. ‘Zinc’ and ‘Tin’) gives a list of these and other compositions, Mannheim gold, Dutch gold, Prince’s metal, Bristol brass, &c.
[298] Possibly the Armenian bole (Bol-i-Armani), used in the East as a flux from time immemorial. The ‘dropping’ or ‘distilling’ (per descensum) must allude to a distillatory or condensing apparatus, and the ‘false silver’ cannot be mercury, lead, or tin.
[299] Hence tutaneg and tutanego, which sometimes meant an alloy of tin and bismuth. M. Polo (i. 21) describes ‘tutia’ as very good for the eyes; and his notice of it, and of spodium, reads, according to Colonel Yule, almost like a condensed translation of Galen’s pompholyx, produced from cadmia or carbonate of zinc; and spodos, the residue of the former, which falls on the hearth (De Simp. Med. p. ix.). Matthioli makes pompholyx commonly known in the laboratories by the Arabic name ‘tutia.’ The ‘tutia’ imported into Bombay from the Gulf is made from an argillaceous ore of zinc, moulded into tubular cakes, and baked to a moderate hardness.