Various Modes of its Collection on the Prussian Coast—What is Amber?—The extinct Amber Tree—Insects of the Miocene Period inclosed in Amber—Formidable Spiders—Ancient and Modern Trade in Amber.

Amber is a resinous substance, the produce of extinct forests that now lie buried in the earth or under the bottom of the sea.

It is found abundantly on the Prussian coast of the Baltic, where it is collected in many ways. After stormy weather it is frequently cast ashore by the surf, or remains floating on the water. The amber-fishers, clothed in leather dresses, then wade into the sea, and secure the amber with bag-nets, hung at the ends of long poles. They conclude that much amber has been detached from its bed when they discover many pieces of lignite floating about. In some parts the faces of the precipitous cliffs along the shore are explored in boats, and masses of loose earth or rock, supposed to contain the object of search, are detached with long poles having iron hooks at their ends. It is also dredged for on an extensive scale at the bottom of the Frische and Curische Haffs, and further inland large quantities are dug up out of the earth. That which is washed ashore generally consists of small pieces, more or less damaged, while the specimens obtained by digging or dredging are frequently of large size and of a tuberous form, so that, though inferior in quantity to the former, their value is probably ten times greater.

Digging for amber is a favourite pursuit of the peasantry; and though in many cases it proves unsuccessful, yet sometimes it is highly remunerative. Near the village Kowall, a few miles from Dantzig, avenues of trees were planted a few years back along the high road. On digging one of the holes destined for their reception, a rich amber nest was found. Favourable signs induced the landowner to persevere in digging, and at length, at a depth of about thirty feet, such rich deposits of amber were found as enabled him to pay off all the mortgages on his estate.

The territories where amber is found extend over Pomerania and East and West Prussia, as far as Lithuania and Poland, but chiefly in the former provinces, where it is found almost uniformly in separate nodules in the sand, clay, or fragments of lignite of the upper tertiary and alluvial formations. It also occurs in the beds of streams, and in the sand-banks of rivers. How far its seat may extend under the Baltic is of course unknown. Amber is likewise met with on the coast of Denmark and Sweden, in Gallicia and Moravia, near Christiania in Norway, and in Switzerland, near Basle. It is occasionally found in the gravel-pits near London, and specimens have been dug up in Hyde Park. At Aldborough, after a raking tide, it is thrown on the beach in considerable quantities, along with masses of jet.

On the Sicilian coast, near the mouth of the River Giaretta, many pieces of a peculiar blue tinge are collected and sent to Catania to be cut and polished.

Single pieces and even large deposits of amber are said to have been discovered on the coasts of the Caspian Sea, in Siberia, Kamtschatka, and China, in North America and Madagascar. These accounts, however, require confirmation, as several other fossil or non-fossil resinous substances so strongly resemble amber as to have deceived even well-informed naturalists.

What is this substance, and how has it been produced? There is now no longer any doubt that, like other vegetable resins, it has been secreted by trees which have long since disappeared from the surface of the earth, but once formed extensive forests on the islands or shores of the vast sea which at that time covered the plains of Northern Europe as far as the foot of the Ouralian chain.

How those islands disappeared, and how those primeval forests came to be buried under land and sea, becomes apparent from the changes that have taken place in the South Baltic lands since the last two thousand years in consequence of partial upheavings and subsidences. According to the oldest Prussian chronicler, Peter of Duesburg, whose narrative begins with the year 1226, the waves of the Baltic at that time reached as far as the present town of Kulm, and a century later vessels sailed as far as Thorn. The present delta of the Vistula was a shallow morass, dotted here and there with a flat island, and continued in that state until towards the end of the thirteenth century, when dykes, raised by the industry of man, prevented the constantly recurring inundations of the river, and converted gloomy swamps into fertile meadows.

In other parts we find the sea incroaching upon the land. Since the times of the Teutonic Order a whole province between Pillau and Balga has been submerged by the floods of the Frische Haff; and the first Christian church in Prussia, originally built five miles from the sea, now stands close to the shore. Dense fir-forests rose in gloomy monotony, but a thousand years back, where now the Baltic rolls its waters; and where at that time ships lay at anchor we now find hillocks of sand. After such changes in comparatively so short a time, we cannot wonder that the islands of the amber period should have been replaced by other lands and another sea.

We are indebted for the first accurate observations on the nature of the amber-tree to Professor Goeppert, who proved, by the microscopical examination of the cells of fossil pieces of wood that were veined or streaked with amber, and thus evidently had secreted the resin, that they proceeded from several coniferÆ, belonging to the extinct genus Pinites.

In many of our pines and firs we frequently find between the annual rings crevices or interstices filled with resinous matter, but far less abundantly than in the amber-trees. The only existing coniferous plant that can in any way be compared to them is the Dammara australis, of New Zealand, at the base of whose trunk masses of resin, weighing twenty or thirty pounds, are frequently found. In Brazil Von Martius often saw similar lumps at the foot of the copal-tree, which dropping from the trunk had collected in considerable masses between the roots, thus showing that the large rounded or globular pieces of amber must have been formed in the same manner, while the thin and flat straight or cupuliform pieces were moulded upon the rind, or between the annual rings of the tree.

When we consider the abundant secretion of the amber-trees, and the numberless ages during which they may have flourished, we cannot wonder that, since the oldest historic times, every violent storm which stirs up the ancient forest-grounds at the bottom of the Baltic casts the valuable fossil ashore, and that in all probability future generations will still be able to collect it in undiminished quantities.

Interesting in itself, amber acquires a still greater scientific importance through the remains of extinct plants and animals which are found imbedded in its substance, as in a transparent shrine. As, in the present day, many a luckless fly is caught in the recently secreted resins of the coniferÆ and hymeneÆ, thus also amber, while still in a semi-fluid state, became the tomb of numerous insects and spiders. So wonderful is their preservation that they seem to have lived but yesterday, and yet how many millenniums may since have passed away; for although the amber formation belongs to the miocene period, and is consequently of modern date when compared with the forests of the coal-formation, we still are separated from it by a vast series of ages.

The extinct organic world which is thus beautifully revealed to us so greatly resembled the present vegetable and animal creation that, on a superficial examination of the fossil remains contained in a rich amber collection, one would hardly suppose them to be anything very uncommon. The unlearned observer who connects the idea of a past world with grotesque or gigantic forms, shakes his head with an incredulous smile, and thinks that he has often seen similar flowers blooming in the fields, or met with similar insects in the forest. Even the naturalist is uncertain, until a closer inspection teaches him that each of these so wonderfully preserved plants or animals possesses some distinct characteristics which widely distinguish it from the analogous forms of the present day.

Of the plants of the coal period we find not a single one existing in the Amber Forest; the vegetation is much more complicated and various in its aspect; and the numerous coniferÆ indicate a climate similar to that of the present northern regions. But arboreal growth was by no means confined to the coniferÆ, for evergreen oaks and poplars flourished along with them.

Heath plants, chiefly belonging to genera similar to Andromeda, Kalmia, Rhododendrum, Ledum, and Vaccinium, as testified by numerous leaves, formed the underwood of these forests, a vegetation similar in character to that of the Alleghany Mountains.

The deep shade of these primitive woods prevented the evaporation of water, the ground remained damp and swampy, and the mouldering leaves produced a thick layer of humus, on which flourished, no doubt, a dense cryptogamous vegetation, as well-preserved ferns, mosses, lichens, confervÆ, and small mushrooms, partly growing as parasites on dead insects, sufficiently testify.

But the vegetable remains of that ancient period are far surpassed in variety and number by the embalmed relics of the animal creation. Among 2,000 specimens of insects collected by Dr. Berendt, to whom we owe the best monograph on amber, this naturalist found more than 800 different species.

Flies, phryganeÆ, and other neuroptera, crustacea, millepedes and spiders, blattidÆ in every phase of development, beetles, bees, and a large variety of ants, show a great similarity to the insect life of the present day, and justify the conclusion that the contemporaneous animal forms, whose size or peculiar habitat prevented their being embalmed in amber, were comparatively no less abundant.

Whether man already existed at the time of the amber-formation is a question which, of course, could only be thoroughly settled by the discovery of some specimen of human workmanship imbedded in the fossilised resin. At all events, the amber-rings of rude workmanship which have been found at a considerable depth below the surface of the earth, along with rough pieces, sufficiently prove that man must have been a very old inhabitant of the Baltic regions, for those remarkable specimens of his unskilled industry have evidently preceded the catastrophe which buried the rough amber under the earth, and must have been exposed for the same lapse of time to the influences of the soil, as they are all found covered with the same dull and damaged crust.

That birds enlivened the amber-forest might well have been supposed, as there was no want of fruits and mealy seeds for their subsistence; but their existence is proved beyond all doubt by a feather which Dr. Berendt discovered in a piece of pale yellow transparent amber. To what bird may this remarkable relic of the past have belonged, and when may the wing to which it was attached while living have cleaved the air?

No fish or reptile has ever yet been found in amber, however frequently fraud may have attempted to imbed them in a resinous case for the deception of ignorance. It is, indeed, hardly conceivable that the finny and agile inhabitants of the waters could ever have allowed themselves to be caught in the resins of a terrestrial forest, though some small and less active reptiles may occasionally have been entrapped.

Of all the insects and spiders, and the more rare crustaceans inclosed in amber, not a single specimen belongs to a species of the present time; but though the species have disappeared, almost all the animals of those primitive woods, as far as they are known, belong to genera of the present time, so that upon the whole the proportion of the still flourishing genera to such as are extinct is as eight to one.

It is remarkable that, along with many specimens similar to the present indigenous types, some are found with a tropical character, whose representatives are at present existing in the Brazilian forests, while others are completely without any analogous forms in the present creation; as, for instance, those strange Arachnidans, the ArchÆi, which, armed with toothed mandibles longer than the head, and provided with strong raptorial claws, must have been most formidable enemies to the contemporaneous insects.

Amber was held in high estimation by the nations of antiquity, and reckoned among the gems on account of its rarity and value. Ornaments made of this substance have been found among the vestiges of the lacustrine dwellings of Switzerland, and afford a convincing proof that even in prehistoric times it was an article of commerce. Many centuries before the Christian era the Phoenician navigators purchased amber from the German tribes on the coast of the North Sea, these, in their turn, having obtained it, probably by barter, from the Baltic lands. Thus from hand to hand the beautiful fossil resin found its way to the courts of the Indian princes on the Ganges, and of the Persian kings in Susa and Persepolis. According to Barth^[69] the search for the Amber Land was most probably the aim of the journey which the celebrated traveller Pytheas of Massilia undertook 330 years before Christ, in the times of Alexander the Great.

Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Æschylus, have described and lauded in prose and verse the wonderful properties of amber, which was not only highly valued for its beauty, its aromatic smell, and its electro-magnetic power, but also for the medicinal virtues ascribed to it by a credulous age.

Under Nero the wealthy Roman senators and knights lavished immense sums on decorating the seats and tables, the doors and columns, of their state-rooms with amber, ivory, and tortoiseshell; and even at a later period, under Theodosius the Great, when the declining empire was already verging to its fall, large quantities still continued to be imported from Germany.

Though no longer so highly prized as by the ancients, amber still continues to be a source of considerable profit to the Baltic provinces. Almost all the amber collected throughout the land finds its way to the seaports of KÖnigsberg and Dantzig, where it is sorted according to its size and quality. Good round pieces of a shape fit to be worked into ornaments, and weighing about half an ounce, are worth from nine to ten dollars per pound; a good piece of a pound weight fetches as much as fifty dollars; and first-rate specimens of a still more considerable size, and faultless in form and colour, are worth at least one hundred dollars, or even more, per pound. A mass weighing thirteen pounds has been found, the value of which at Constantinople was said to be no less than 30,000 dollars. Smaller pieces from the size of a bean to that of a pea, such as are fit for the beads of necklaces or rosaries, are valued at from two to four shillings per pound, and the grit or amber rubbish which is used for varnishing, fumigating, or the manufacture of oil and acid of amber, is worth no more than from three to eighteen pence. It is much to be regretted that amber, when melted or dissolved, is incapable of coalescing into larger masses with the retention of all its former qualities, as then its value would be considerably greater. Large amber vases would then ornament the apartments of the wealthy, and the corpses of the illustrious dead might repose in transparent shrines, and their features be preserved from decay for many ages.

The trade in rough amber is almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews, who purchase it from the amber-fishers, or are interested in the diggings which are made on most of the littoral estates. Through the agency of the smaller collectors, it is then concentrated in the hands of the rich traders, who sell or export it in larger assortments.

The best qualities only of translucent, milky, or semi-opaque amber find a ready sale in the Oriental market, where they are almost exclusively used for making the mouth-pieces to pipes, and these form an essential constituent of the Turkish tschibouque; for there is a current belief among the Eastern nations that amber is incapable of transmitting infection.

Every Turkish pasha sets his pride on a rich collection of pipes, as it is the hospitable custom of the Orient to offer a cup of coffee and a hookah or tschibouque to a stranger; and this fashion is of no small importance to the amber-dealers of the Baltic. A somewhat inferior quality is sent by way of Copenhagen and London to China, Japan, and to the East and West Indies.

Russia also consumes a considerable quantity of amber, which is very elegantly turned or manufactured in St. Petersburg and Polangen, and thence finds its way over the whole empire. Here, as among the Turks, only the translucent and perfectly opaque white qualities are esteemed; the latter being chiefly employed for the manufacture of the calculating tables which are commonly used by the Russian merchants. Necklaces of transparent amber are in great request among the peasantry of Hanover and Brunswick, where strings of pale-coloured crystalline beads weighing from half a pound to a pound are worth from fifty to sixty dollars.

Amber of a deeper colour and of a rounded form is chiefly exported to Spain, France, and Italy.

Thus each country chooses according to its taste among the abundant amber-masses which extinct forests furnish to the inhabitants of the Baltic coast-lands, and which trade, through a hundred known and unknown channels, scatters over the whole surface of the globe.