! ^ 



TRADITIONS OF THE AMBER. 17 



legend persist, men came to search the shores of Eridanus 

 for amber, as the Spanish adventurers sought the Eldorado 

 in the new world. 



"Dost thou think that we would tug against this torrent 

 for two oboli a day?'' laughed the boatmen of the Po to 

 the discomfited Lucian, "could we find riches under the 

 poplar trees for the picking up?" 



To the mythical tales set afloat by the traders, became 

 added the fancies of the poets. Amber is gathered, so ran 

 one fable, by the maiden guardians of the golden Hesper- 

 ides as it falls from the poplars into Lake Electrum ; it is 

 the slime of drear Lake Cephisis, the sweat of the laboring 

 soil under the fierce rays of the sun, the tears of the Indian 

 birds for the death of Meleager, said others. And the 

 sailors told of other Electrides islands in the German 

 ocean and off the Calabrian coast where grew the tree 

 "Electrida," and of stones in far-off Britain "purging 

 thick amber." 



It often happens that historical facts become embedded, 

 as it were, in the names of things, and thus preserved, 

 and the knowledge of them so passed down through cen- 

 turies. Just as we find now locked in the yellow depths 

 of the amber, bodies of insects which lived ages ago, so in 

 one of the designations which the people of ancient times 

 gave to it is embalmed, perhaps, the story of how elec- 

 tricity first became known to the civilized world. 



The Syrian women, Pliny says, 1 called the amber "har- 

 paga" or "the clutcher;" which is obviously based on a 

 peculiarity of it altogether different from that which caused 

 it to be likened to an embodied sunbeam. This name, in 

 turn, came from its use in spinning, the oldest handiwork 

 known to the race, and in the mode of spinning which has 

 been employed since the very beginning of civilization. 

 So that we may conjecture that the name came down from 

 the old Phoenicians, and that the amber which they 



1 Pliny : lib. xxxvii. c. I ; Aldrovandus : Musaeum Metallicum. Milan, 

 1648, 404. 

 2 



