AMBER is not unfrequently picked up among the pebbles of the East Coast. I once picked up a piece on the beach at Felixstowe as big as a turkey's egg, thinking it was an ordinary flint-pebble and intending to throw it into the sea, when my attention was arrested by its extraordinary lightness, and I found that I had got hold of an unusually large lump of amber. There is a locality where amber occurs in considerable quantity. It is a long way off—namely, the promontory called Samland near KÖnigsberg on the Prussian shore of the Baltic. There it occurs with fossil wood and leaves in strata of early Tertiary age, deposited a little later than our "London clay." It used to be merely picked up on the shore there until recent times, when "mining" for it was started. From this region (the Baltic coast of Prussia) amber was carried by the earliest traders in prehistoric times to various parts of Europe. Their journeyings can be traced by the discovery of amber beads in connexion with interments and dwelling-places along what are called "amber routes" radiating from the amber coast of Prussia. To reach the East Coast of England the bits of amber would have to be carried by submarine currents. Amber travels faster and farther than ordinary stones, on account of its lightness. What has been held to be amber is found, also embedded in ancient Tertiary strata, in small quantity in France, in Sicily, in Burma, and in green sand (below the chalk) in the United States. The Sicilian amber (called "Simetite") was not known to the ancients: it is remarkable for being "fluorescent," as is also some recently discovered in Southern Mexico. But it is possible that chemically these substances are not quite the same as true amber. Amber is a fossil resin or gum, similar to that exuded by many living trees, such as gum-copal. It has been used as an ornament from prehistoric times onwards, and was greatly valued by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, not only for decorative purposes, but as a "charm," it being supposed to possess certain magical properties.

Amber (it is generally believed) comes slowly drifting along the sea bottom to the Suffolk shore from the Baltic. Lumps as big as one's fist are sometimes picked up here. The largest pieces on record found on the Baltic shore, or dug out of the mines there, are from 12 to 18 lb. in weight, and valued at £1000. A party sent by the Emperor Nero brought back 13,000 lb. of amber from the Baltic shores to Rome. The bottom currents of seas and oceans, such as those which possibly bring amber to our shores, are strangely disposed. The Seigneur of Sark some fifty years ago was shipwrecked in his yacht near the island of Guernsey; he lost, among other things, a well-fastened, strongly-made chest, containing silver plate. It was found a year later in deep water off the coast of Norway and restored to him! In the really deep sea, over 1000 fathoms down, there are well-marked broad currents which may be described as rivers of very cold water (only four degrees or so above freezing-point). They flow along the deep sea bottom and are sharply marked off from the warmer waters above and to the side. Their inhabitants are different from those of the warmer water. They are due to the melting of the polar ice, the cold water so formed sinking at once owing to its greater density below the warmer water of the surface currents. These deep currents originate in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and the determination of their force and direction, as well as of those of other ocean currents, both deep and superficial, such as the warm "Gulf Stream," which starts from the Gulf of Mexico, and the great equatorial currents, is a matter of constant study and observation, in which surveying ships and skilled observers have been employed.

Amber has not only been valued for its beauty of colour—yellow, flame-colour, and even deep red and sometimes blue—for its transparency, its lightness, and the ease with which it can be carved, but also on account of certain magical properties attributed to it. Pliny, the great Roman naturalist of the first century A.D., states that a necklace of amber beads protects the wearer against secret poisoning, sorcery, and the evil eye. It is first mentioned by Homer, and beads of it were worn by prehistoric man. Six hundred years B.C., a Greek observer (Thales) relates that amber when rubbed has the power of attracting light bodies. That observation is the starting-point of our knowledge of electricity, a name derived from the Greek word for amber, "electron." In Latin, amber is called "succinum." By heating in oil or a sand-bath, amber can be melted, and the softened pieces squeezed together to form larger masses. It can also be artificially stained, and cloudy specimens are rendered transparent by heating in an oil-bath.

Amber is the resinous exudation of trees like the "Copal gum" of East Africa and the "Kauri resin" or "Dammar" of New Zealand. Both of these products are very much like amber in appearance, and can be readily mistaken for it. The trees which produced the amber of the Baltic were conifers or pine trees, and flourished in early Tertiary times (many millions of years ago). Their leaves, as well as insects of many kinds, which have been studied and named by entomologists, are found preserved in it. There is a very fine collection of these insects in the Natural History Museum in London. It is probable that more than one kind of tree produced the amber-gum, and that its long "fossilization" has resulted in some changes in its density and its chemical composition. The East African copal is formed by a tree which belongs to the same family as our beans, peas, and laburnum. It is obtained when freshly exuded, but the best kind is dug by the negroes out of the ground, where copal trees formerly grew and have left their remains, so that copal, like amber, is to a large extent fossilized. The same is true of the New Zealand dammar or kauri gum, which is the product of a conifer called "Agathis australis," and is very hard and amber-like in appearance. Chemically amber, copal, and dammar are similar to one another but not identical. Amber, like the other two, has been used for making "varnish," and the early Flemish painters in oils, as well as the makers of Cremona violins, made use of amber varnish.

A medicament called "eau de luce" was formerly used, made by dissolving one of the products of the dry distillation of amber (called "oil of amber") in alcohol. Now, however, amber is used only for two purposes—besides decoration—namely, for the mouthpieces of pipes and cigar tubes and for burning (for amber, like other resins, burns with a black smoke and agreeable odour) as a kind of incense (especially at the tomb of Mahomet at Mecca). These uses are chiefly Oriental, and most European amber now goes to the East. In China they use a fine sort of amber, obtained from the north of Burma. The use of amber as a mouthpiece is connected with its supposed virtues in protecting the mouth against poison and infection. It is softer than the teeth, and therefore pleasant to grip with their aid; but as a cigar or cigarette tube it is disadvantageous, as it does not absorb the oil which is formed by the cooling of the tobacco smoke passing along it, but allows it to condense as an offensive juice.

Forty years ago an old lady used to sit in the doorway of her timber-built cottage in the village of Trimley (where there are the churches of two parishes in one churchyard), smoking a short clay pipe and carving bits of amber found on the Suffolk beach into the shape of hearts, crosses, and beads. She would carve and polish the amber you had found yourself whilst you joined her in a friendly pipe. You were sure in those days of the genuine character of the amber, jet, and agate sold as "found on the beach." Nowadays these things, as well as polished agates and "pebbles from the beach," are, I am sorry to say, manufactured in Germany, and sent to many British seaside resorts, like the false coral and celluloid tortoise-shell which, side by side with the genuine articles, are offered by picturesque Levantines to the visitors at hotels on the Riviera, and even in Naples itself. Nevertheless, genuine and really fine specimens of amber picked up on the beach and polished so as to show to full advantage their beautiful colour and "clouding" can still be purchased in the jeweller's shop at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast near the great pebble beach of Orfordness.

There are difficulties about using the word "amber" with scientific precision. The fossil resins which pass under this name in commerce, and are obtained in various localities, including the Prussian mines on the Baltic, are undoubtedly the product of several different kinds of trees, and, from the strictly scientific chemical point of view, they are mixtures in varying proportions of different chemical substances. The merchant is content with a certain hardness (which he tests with a penknife), transparency, and colour, and also attaches great importance to the test of burning a few fragments in a spoon, when, if the material is to pass as "amber," it should give an agreeable perfume. Scientifically speaking, "amber" differs from other "resins," including copal, in having a higher melting point, greater hardness, slighter solubility in alcohol and in ether, and in containing "succinic acid" as an important constituent, which the other resins, even those most like it, do not. True amber thus defined is called "succinite," but several other resins accompany it even as found in its classical locality—the Baltic shore of Prussia—and, owing to their viscid condition before fossilization, may have become mixed with it. One of these is called "gedanite," and is used for ornamental purposes. It is more brittle than amber, and contains no succinic acid. It is usually clear and transparent, and of a pale wine-yellow colour.

It is not possible to be certain about the exact nature of what appears to be a "piece of amber" thrown up on the seashore, without chemical examination. A year or two ago a friend brought to me a dark brownish-yellow-coloured piece of what looked like amber, which (so my friend stated) had been picked up on the shore at Aldeburgh. It was as big as three fingers of one's hand, very transparent and fibrous-looking, owing to the presence of fine bubbles in its substance arranged in lines. I found an exactly similar piece from the same locality in the collection of the Natural History Museum. It was labelled "copal," and, I suppose, had been chemically ascertained to be that resin and not "amber," or, to use the correct name, "succinite." How either of these pieces got into the North Sea it is difficult to say. Though the "copal" of commerce is obtained from the West Coast of Africa, it may occur (though I have not heard that it does) associated with true amber in Prussia. A fossilized resin very similar to copal is found in the London clay at Highgate and elsewhere near London, and is called "copalite." It is possible, though not probable, that the bits of amber found on our East Coast beaches are derived from Tertiary beds, now broken up and submerged in the North Sea, and do not travel to us all the way from the Baltic.