Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/476

168 That the art of bronzing was practised in the same temple-shop is attested by the juxtaposition of the recipes for dyeing and the recipes for bronzing in the Leyden papyrus; also by the fact that the mordants used in dyeing were the first re-agents employed upon the metals; again, by the fact that the terms used in the art of dyeing were transferred with a similar but different meaning to the bench of the bronzer."

Not only were metals dyed (transmuted); colours were extracted from metals, as Principal Laurie, Edinburgh, has found. The substances from which sacred colours were derived were sacred substances.

The importance of the colour-clue is further emphasised when we find that searchers for metals identified metallic rocks by their colours. This habit, which is no doubt of great antiquity, is revealed in a British Museum Library Manuscript (Harl. MSS. 251, fo. 109), which was written about 1603 by an English metal-searcher who visited Crawford Moor in Lanarkshire to ascertain if the gold deposits there could be profitably worked. "Fyrste I doe conceave the rockes in collore and substance to be very myneralle," he begins, and then proceeds to say he found "motheres as the Scottish myneres call them and by our Englyshe leederes or metalline fumes picking betweene two rocks wᶜʰ rocks the Germaynes call hingettes and liggets or maritus et uxore etc. The mettaline fumes or brethe of the vaines (of metals) gyve diveres tinctures and collores to both sydes of the rockes." In those places where gold is found in Scotland, the searcher saw "the blueshe and yellowe collerede leaderes." He was persuaded these coloured leaders extended to "vaynes of golde." The colours were caused by "metalline fumes."

Much more remains to be said about Colour Symbolism as an important line of research, but space forbids me