Klaproth also analyzed an ancient bronze statue in one of the German cabinets, and found it composed of Copper, 916 Tin, 75 Lead, 97 1000 [39]
Several other old brass and bronze pieces of metal, very ancient, but found in Germany, were also analyzed by Klaproth. The result of his analyses was as follows:
The metal of which the altar of Krodo was made consisted of Copper, 69 Zinc, 18 Lead, 13 100 [40]
The emperor’s chair, which had in the eleventh century been transported from Harzburg to Goslar, where it still remains, was found to be composed of Copper, 92·5 Tin, 5·0 Lead, 2·5 100 [41]
Another piece of metal, which enclosed the high altar in a church in Germany, was composed of Copper, 75·0 Tin, 12·5 Lead, 12·5 100 [42]
These analyses, though none of them corresponds exactly with the proportions given by Pliny, confirms sufficiently his general statement, that the bronze of the ancients employed for statues was copper, alloyed with lead and tin.
Some of the bronze statues cast by the ancients were of enormous dimensions, and show decisively the great progress which had been made by them in the art of working and casting metals. The addition of the lead and tin would not only add greatly to the hardness of the alloy, but would at the same time render it more easily fusible. The bronze statue of Apollo, placed in the capitol at the time of Pliny, was forty-five feet high, and cost 500 talents, equivalent to about £50,000 of our money. It was brought from Apollonia, in Pontus, by Lucullus. The famous statue of the sun at Rhodes was the work of Chares, a disciple of Lysippus; it was ninety feet high, was twelve years in making, and cost 300 talents (about £30,000). It was made out of the engines of war left by Demetrius when he raised the siege of Rhodes. After standing fifty-six years, it was overthrown by an earthquake. It lay on the ground 900 years, and was sold by Mauvia, king of the Saracens, to a merchant, who loaded 900 camels with the fragments of it.
Copper was introduced into medicine at rather an early period of society, and various medicinal preparations of it are described by Dioscorides and Pliny. It remains for us to notice the most remarkable of these. Pliny mentions an institution, to which he gives the name of Seplasia; the object of which was, to prepare medicines for the use of medical men. It seems, therefore, to have been similar to our apothecaries’ shops of the present day. Pliny reprobates the conduct of the persons who had the charge of these Seplasiæ in his time. They were in the habit of adulterating medicines to such a degree, that nothing good or genuine could be procured from them.[43]
Both the oxides of copper were known to the ancients, though they were not very accurately distinguished from each other: they were known by the names flos æris and scoria æris, or squama æris. They were obtained by heating bars of copper red-hot and letting them cool, exposed to the air. What fell off during the cooling was the flos, what was driven off by blows of a hammer was the squama or scoria æris. It is obvious, that all these substances were nearly of the same nature, and that they were in reality mixtures of the black and red oxides of copper.
Stomoma seems also to have been an oxide of copper, which was gradually formed upon the surface of the metal, when it was kept in a state of fusion.