gems, jade, Fischer-Book

A French adaptation of Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt’s celebrated treatise on gemstones, prepared by André Toll from Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia. The work describes precious and ornamental stones, their names, colors, physical characteristics, sources, values, methods of identification, imitations, and uses, while also discussing their supposed medicinal and magical properties. Combining practical information for jewelers with mineralogy, medicine, and traditional lapidary lore, it was one of the most important seventeenth-century works on gemstones and helped transmit de Boodt’s pioneering attempts to distinguish reliable observations about gems from inherited superstition.