Dictionarium polygraphicum. Green.

Dictionarium Polygraphicum:
Or, The Whole Body of Arts Regularly Digested.
Vol I.
London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis in Pater-noster Row, and S. Austen in St. Paul's Church Yard. MDCCXXXV.
1735
GREEN is one of the original colours of the rays of light. If urine, citron juice, or spirit of vitriol be cast on a green ribbon, it becomes blue, by reason that the yellow of the greening weed is thereby exhaled and consumed, so that nothing but blue remains behind.

Grass and herbs, and even all vegetables, in places expos'd to the open air are Green, and those in subterraneous places, or places inaccessible to the air, white and yellow. Thus when wheat or the like germinates under ground, 'tis white or yellow; and what is in the open air, green, tho' this too is yellow before it be green.

Artificial Greens are rarely simple colours, but produced by the mixture of yellow and blue.

Two powders, the one blue and the other yellow, well mixt appear perfectly Green; tho' when view’d with a microscope, we may observe a chequer of blue and yellow.

The dyers make divers shades or casts of Green, as light-green, yellow-green, grass-green, laurel-green, sea-green, dark-green, parrot-green, and celaden-green.

All the Greens are first dyed in blue, then taken down with woad, verdigrease, &c. and then green'd with the weed, there being no one ingredient that will give green alone.

Mountain Green or Hungary Green is a sort of greenish powder found in little grains like sand among the mountains of Kernamsent in Hungary, and those of Moldavia.

Though some are of opinion that this mountain green is factitious, and the same with what the antients call'd flos æris, prepar’d by casting water or rather wine on copper red hot from the furnace, and catching the fumes thereof on copper plates laid over for that purpose; or by dissolving copper plates in wine, much after the same manner as in making verdegrease.

Painters make use of this colour for a grass Green.

It is sometimes counterfeited by grinding verdegrease with ceruss.


GREENs are allow'd by all persons to depend upon the YELLOW and BLUE, and any Green colour, whatever you please, may be made with them.

Gamboge is one of the first yellows, which may be made to produce five or six sorts of Green with verdegrease, according as the gamboge is in the greater or lesser proportion; if it abounds, it will make a tolerable oak green, and being mixt with a greater quantity of verdegrease, it will make a fine grass Green.

But the yellow, which some prefer before all others, is made of French-berries, which is either deeper or fainter, according as the liquor they are boil'd in is more or less stain’d by them; if it be very thin, it makes a good glaze all over the verdegrease, and as it approaches nearer to Dutch-pink or gall-stone, commands almost any colour we want; being agreeably mixt with the transparent verdigrease, and is still transparent.

In like manner a yellow, drawn from the roots of barberries, and also that drawn from the roots of the mulberry-tree, will in a great measure produce the like effect, being mixt with the transparent verdegrease.

As for verdegrease it self, it produces a fine bluish Green, flows readily in the pencil, and may even serve as an ink to write with.