DR T. THOMSON on Asbestus, Chlorite and Talc, 353 



I. ASBESTUS. 



Asbestus was known to the ancients. PLINY gives a pretty 

 long account of it. He says, that a " kind of linen is found, 

 which is not consumed by the fire. It is called Vivum, and we 

 see table-cloths of it heated red hot in the fires of convivial par- 

 ties, and the stains being thus burnt off, they look much cleaner 

 than they could have been made by means of water. Such 

 pieces of cloth are employed to wrap up the bodies of kings, be- 

 fore they are placed on the funeral pile, and thus separate the 

 ashes of the dead body from those of the fuel. This flax is 

 produced in the deserts of India burnt up by the sun, where no 

 rain falls, amidst direful serpents. It becomes accustomed to 

 live by burning. It is rarely found, and is difficult to weave on 

 account of the shortness of the threads*." PLINY mentions the 

 amianthus among stones, says it resembles alum, and that it 

 loses nothing in the firef. AGRICOLA, in his fifth book, De 

 Natura Fossilium, gives a long account of it, chiefly taken from 

 the ancients ; but he informs us, that it existed in his time in 

 great abundance in the mines of Noricum, and that it could 

 therefore be obtained at a very cheap rate. 



KONIG, in his Regnum Minerale, published in 1687, gives a 

 description of amianthus, and says, that it is rendered fit for 

 being spun into thread, by being boiled for a quarter of an hour 

 in an alkaline ley:}:. In the first edition of LINNJEUS'S Systema 

 Natura, published in 1736, amianthus, asbestus, talcum, and mica, 

 constitute the four subdivisions of the order Apyras. CRON- 

 STEDT, in his Mineralogy, first published in 1758, introduced the 

 same minerals under the division Terra Asbestintp. BERGMAN 



* Lib. xix. cap. 1. f Lib. xxvi. cap. 19. 



