r it. Tacitus was
not far wrong when he conjectured that amber is a gum or resin exuded
from certain trees, although other authorities have preferred a theory
that it is a kind of wax or fat which has undergone slow petrifaction.
At any rate, it must at one time have been liquid or semi-liquid; for
insects, flies, detached wings and legs, and small fragments of
various kinds, are often found imbedded in it--those odds and ends of
which Pope said:--

"The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare;
The wonder's how the devil they got there!"

Whether new stores of amber are now being formed, or whether, like
coal, it was the result of causes not now in operation, is an unsolved
problem. The specimens obtained differ considerably; some are pale as
primrose, some deep orange or almost brown; some nearly as transparent
as crystal, some nearly opaque. Large pieces, uniform in color and
translucency, fetch high prices; and there are fashions in this matter
for which it is not easy to account,--seeing that the Turks and other
Orientals buy up, at prices which Europeans are unwilling to give, all
the specimens presenting a straw-yellow color and a sort of cloudy
translucency. The Russians, on the contrary, prefer orange-yellow
transparent specimens. The amber is seldom obtained by actual mining.

[Illustration: Searching for amber.]

It is usually found on sea-coasts, after storms, in rounded nodules;
or, if scarce on shore, it is sought for by men clad in leather
garments, who wade up to their necks in the sea, and scrape the
sea-bottom with hooped nets attached to the end of long poles; or
(rather dangerous work) men go out in boats, and examine the faces of
precipitous cliffs, picking off, by means of iron hooks, the lumps of
amber which they may see here and there. Sometimes a piece weighing
nearly a pound is found, and a weight of even ten pounds is recorded.
As small pieces can easily be joined by smoothing the surfaces,
moistening them with linseed oil, and pressing them together over a
charcoal fire, and as gum copal is sometimes very like amber, there is
much sophistication indulged in, which none but an expert can guard
against. In fashioning the nodules of amber, whether genuine or
fictitious, into pipe mouth-pieces, they are split on a leaden plate
in a turning lathe, smoothed into shape by whet-stones, rubbed with
chalk and water, and polished with a piece of flannel. It is an
especially difficult kind of