66 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. XIII. 



cause a mineralogist or geologist to pay a visit to those Chinese turquois 

 mines, and to give us information on their extent, the working methods 

 employed, and the magnitude of the output and trade in the material. 

 In Japan the turquois does not occur, and it has been unknown to the 

 Japanese. The Japanese mineralogists, on becoming acquainted with 

 it through our literature, coined the artificial word turkodama. 



ADDITIONAL NOTES 



pp. 1-4. The date of the introduction of the turquois into India may be some- 

 what more exactly defined by referring to the negative evidence presented by the 

 great Sanskrit-Buddhist dictionary, the Mahavyutpatti (Th. Zachariae, Die indi- 

 schen Worterbiicher, p. 39) the Sanskrit text of which, accompanied by a Tibetan 

 translation, is printed in the Tibetan Tanjur (Sutra, Vol. 123). In Ch. 235 (ed. of 

 MiNAYEV and Mironov, p. 77, St. Petersburg, 191 1) giving the names of precious 

 stones, the word for turquois, peroja, is not included, quite in accordance with the 

 fact that the turquois is not spoken of in Buddhist literature. We are therefore 

 justified in concluding that at the time when Buddhism was introduced from India 

 into Tibet, in the seventh and eighth centuries, the stone was not yet known in 

 India, whereas at the same time it was widely known and appreciated in Tibet; thus, 

 Tibetan knowledge of th6 turquois is not due to an impetus received from India. 

 The Sanskrit-Tibetan equation, peroja = gyu, which we might expect does not exist in 

 lexicographical literature. The earliest historical testimony for turquois in India, 

 as shown above p. 3, remains that of al-Beruni in the post-Buddhistic or Moham- 

 medan period, and even at his time the turquois cannot have been very generally 

 diffused over India, as at that time it had not yet entered the horizon of the Indian 

 mineralogists. 



p. I. The Persian word ferozah or firozah (firilza) for the turquois means "victori- 

 ous," and is derived from the word feroz or firoz, "victory, victorious, successful" 

 (see, for example, Johnson and Richardson's Persian-English Dictionary, ed. by 

 Steingass, p. 944). Also the Arabic mineralogist al-Akfani explains the Persian 

 name of the turquois as signifying "victory"; hence, he says, it is called also "stone 

 of victory" (Wiedemann, Zur Mineralogie im Islam, p. 225); likewise, al-Ta"alibi 

 {ibid., p. 242) has an allusion to this effect. A similar notion seems to be underlying 

 the first of five turquois varieties established by the Lama Klong-rdol (Chandra 

 Das, Tibetan-English Dictionary, p. 1152), called zil-gnon gyu spyang, in which term 

 the first element has the significance "overcoming, vanquishing." 



p. 3, note I. It should not be understood that Dioscorides had any knowledge of 

 turquois; he does not mention it (in the same manner as his contemporary Pliny) 

 nor does he have any name that could be interpreted as such. In Ch. 157 of his 

 Materia Medica he speaks of the sapphire (sappheiros) , i.e., lapis lazuli, and says that 

 those bitten by a scorpion will be relieved by taking this stone as a potion (compare 

 F. de Mely, Les lapidaires grecs. Traduction, p. 24, Paris, 1902). It is only in the 

 mediaeval work of Ibn al-Baitar, the Arabic version of Dioscorides, that the same 

 notion is transferred to the turquois. 



p. 14, note I. The statement that Li Shi belongs to the T'ang period is based on 

 the fact that in the editions of the Sii po wu chi he is assigned to the T'ang. This, 

 however, seems to be a mere traditional opinion, while in fact the work is said to date 

 from the Sung period (Pelliot, Journal asiaiique, Juillet-AoUt, 1912, p. 155). 



p. 21. M. Pelliot, who showed me the favor of looking over the galley-proofs 

 of this paper, kindly calls my attention to another interesting text mentioning a fossil 

 tree. This is the Tu yang tsa pien (Ch. C, p. i, edition of Pai hai) written by Su Ngo 



