Any one of my readers who chooses can produce the wonderful orange-coloured flame by rubbing two quartz or flint pebbles together in the dark, and can have the further gratification of producing with the utmost ease the mysterious and weird phenomenon of a flame under water, and may, perhaps, by further experiment, explain satisfactorily this unsolved marvel which has haunted some of us since childhood.
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.