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recipient, ply it with a strong fire, and when well dephleg-mated, pour it, as it corrodes ordinary glass, intoaWal-denburg flask; then throw into it a pulverised green Bohe-mian emerald, otherwise called hesphortis (which, whenreduced to powder and heated, emits in the dark a greenlight,) and place it in warm sand for twenty-four hours.Take a piece of glass, well cleaned and freed from ail greaseby meads of a ley, put a border of wax round it, about aninch in height, and cover it equally all over with the aboveacid. The longer you let it stand so much the better, andat the end of some time the glass will be corroded, and thefigures, which have been traced out with sulphur and var-nish, will appear as if raised above the plane of theglass.
The researches of Flavius Blotidus’ and LaurentiusValla , 1 both of them writers as early as the fifteenth cen-tury, have negatived the question, which, we understand,had subsisted before their time, as to the knowledge, or,ut least, the use of falconry among the ancient Greeks.Higault , 3 Pancirollus, Salmuth, and others, have concurred
1 Blondus, or Biondo, in describing an Italian village, says, " I shall embrace“ this opportunity of mentioning anew circumstance, which is, that fowling with“ that rapacious bird the falcon, a diversion much followed at Arno, by the cele-** bratcd Alphonsus, King of Arragon, was entirely unknown about two hundred** years ago; for though Servius, the grammarian , says that Capua received that'* * *• name from the augury of a falcon, because the Hetruscans. when founding it,u saw one of these birds, which in their language was called capis; yet he does" not tell us of what use they were to mankind. Besides, Pliny , who gives the** names of many rapacious birds of the hawk kind, (accipitres scilicet majoresetif minores achitvones, quos aliqui falconet fails e volunt t ) says nothing of their being“ employed to catch game ; and, without doubt, had fowling in this manner been** practised in the time of Virgil , he would have made Aeneas and Dido carry“ such birds along with them when they went out a hunting, whereas be saysonly:
* f Massyliique ruunt equiteset odora catium vis.*
*' I will venture, therefore, to affirm, that two hundred years ago, as I have already*' said, no nation or people were accustomed to catch cither land or water-fowls,c with any rapacious bird lamed for that purpose.”
1 Valla, the roost learned roan of the century in which he lived, contradictsAntonias Reuaudensis, who says, A T ofa is a hawk's bell. “ If Nola says Valla ,“ be an old word, it cannot signify that bell now worn by hawks, because theft ancients never tamed these birds lor catching game, as we do, nor ornamented
*• them with bells. If it be a new word, let him produce the author from whom itis taken.” Laurentii ValUe Opera. Basilis, 1543, fol. p, 433.
3 In the preface to Scriptores rex accipitrarix.