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IRANIAN MINERALS AMBER   523

exhausted long ago. Thus Pliny and the ancient Chinese agree on the fact that amber was a product of India, while no amber-mines are known there at present.' Amber was formerly found in the district of Yun-c`an in Yün-nan, and even on the sacred Hwa-san in

Sen-si.2

G. JACOB3 has called attention to the fact that the supposition of a derivation of the Chinese word from Pahlavi kahrupdi is confronted with unsurmountable difficulties of a chronological character. The

phonetic difficulties are still more aggravating; for Chinese hu-p`o   Al
was anciently *gu-bak, and any alleged resemblance between the two words vanishes. Still less can Greek harpax4 come into question as the foundation of the Chinese word, which, in my opinion, comes from an ancient an or T`ai language of Yün-nan, whence the Chinese received a kind of amber as early at least as the first century A.D. Of the same

origin, I am inclined to think, is the word tun-mou   $ for amber,
first and exclusively used by the philosopher Wan C`un.5

Uigur kubik is not the original of the Chinese word, as assumed by Klaproth; but the Uigur, on the contrary (like Korean xobag), is a transcription of the Chinese word. Mongol xuba and Manchu xôba are likewise so, except that these forms were borrowed at a later period, when the final consonant of Chinese bak or bek was silent.'

90. Coral is a substance of animal origin; but, as it has always been conceived in the Orient as a precious stone,' a brief notice of it, as far as Sino-Persian relations are concerned, may be added here. The

1 Cf. Ts'ien Han Su, Ch. 96 A, p. 5 (amber of Kashmir) ; Nan Si, Ch. 78, p. 7.

z Cf. Hwa yo ci   , Ch. 3, p. i (ed. of 1831).

3 L. c., p. 355.

' Proposed by HIRTH, China and the Roman Orient, p. 245. This was merely a local Syriac name, derived from Greek dpirIq'cu (In Syria quoque feminas verticillos inde facere et vocare harpaga, quia folia paleasque et vestium fimbrias rapiat.—Pliny, xxxvii, II, § 37).

s Cf. A. FORKE, Lun-heng, pt. II, p. 35o. This is not the place for a discussion of this problem, which I have taken up in a study entitled " Ancient Remains from the Languages of the Nan Man."

s For further information on amber, the reader may be referred to my Historical Jottings on Amber in Asia (Memoirs Am. Anthr. Assoc., Vol. I, pt. 3). I hope to come back to this subject in greater detail in the course of my Sino-Hellenistic studies, where it will be shown that the Chinese tradition regarding the origin and properties of amber is largely influenced by the theories of the ancients.

The proof of the animal character of coral is a recent achievement of our science. Peyssonel was the first to demonstrate in 1727 that the alleged coral-flowers are real animals; Pallas then described the coral as Isis nobilis; and Lamarck formed a special genus under the name Corallium rubrum (cf. LACAZE–DUTHIERS, Histoire naturelle du corail, Paris, 1864; GUIBOURT, Histoire naturelle des drogues, Vol. IV, p. 378). The common notion in Asia was that coral is a marine tree.