The Journal of the Board of Arts and Manufactures for Upper Canada, February 1867
This curious substance is familiar to most persons in the shape of beads, buttons, and mouth-pieces for meerschaums. It is found in nodules in the lower part of what geologists call the Tertiary formation. It is frequently found between the bark and the wood of fossil trees, which shows that it was a resinous matter as formed in those trees which exude that class of substances.
That amber was once a soft substance is evident from the fact that insects, ieaves, and other portions of vegetables are frequently found in them, perfectly preserved in all their parts, just the same as if an insect became fastened and imbedded in a soft gum on a tree which afterwards hardened to a solid. Naturalists have detected and described more than eight hundred different species of insects thus entombed in the amber. Though found in the most northern regions, they appear to have been tropical insects, showing that the climate was warmer during the period of their existence than now, while not a single species is known to exist at the present time.
The most important locality, perhaps, of amber, is along the shores of the Baltic sea. It is frequently worked out of the day along the banks of small streams, or on the shores of the sea, and is gathered by the fishermen, who sell it to the merchants to be transported over the world. It also abounds in Sicily, Poland, Saxony and Siberia. It has also been found at Gay Head, Massachusetts, and in Greenland.
Amber is of a yellow color, and is composed of nearly equal portions of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, like common vegetable resin. It burns like resin with a white flame and gives out a pungent odor. It is but little heavier than water. If you take a smooth piece and rub it on flannel it will be powerfully electric and will attract bits of paper. It sometimes becomes so highly electrical when undergoing the polishing process as to fly to pieces, and it affects the arms and wrists of the workmen with peculiar nervous tremors which are anything but pleasant. — Two pieces of amber may be readily joined together by smearing the smooth surfaces with pure linseed oils, and pressing them strongly together and heating them over a charcoal fire. Amber is employed for trinkets to a very great extent in the East. This is especially the case with the Turks, consequently the trade in amber is greater with them than elsewhere. Amber has been much used in making varnishes, and the nice black varnish used by coach-makers, is said to be made of amber and other substances An artificial musk has also been made of it. The demand for amber is fully equal to the supply.
It has served to corroborate by its geological position one of the great questions in geology, that at the time when it was found, and previous to that period, the northern portions of the globe were washed by the warm waters of the ocean the same as they now exist in the tropical regions of the globe.
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