For his Ammianus
Marcellinus the Council of Coventry, his place of residence, paid him
L4, and L5 for a translation of Camden's "Britannia"--small sums,
indeed, for so much labor, but not so unreasonable when we think that
a half-century later the immortal Milton got but L5 for his "Paradise
Lost". He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had
studied and graduated; later he studied medicine, receiving a degree
of M.D., not from Oxford or Cambridge, however, but either from a
Scottish or foreign university.
Although Solinus, writing in the third century A.D., relies mainly
upon Pliny for his information on precious stones, still he here and
there gives evidence of a more critical spirit, as when he says of the
rock-crystal that the theory according to which it was frozen and
hardened water was necessarily incorrect, for it was to be found in
such mild climates as "Alabanda in Asia and the island of
Cyprus".[16] This is the more notable that the wholly incorrect view
persisted into the sixteenth century, so learned a writer as Lord
Bacon (d. 1626) restating it in his last work, "Sylva Sylvarum".
[Footnote 16: Collectanea rerum memorabilium, Cap. 15.]
One of the most curious gem-treatises, especially as a source of early
sixteenth-century beliefs in the magic properties of precious stones,
the "Speculum Lapidum" of Camillo Leonardo, published in Venice, 1502,
probably never came under Shakespeare's eye.
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