gems, jade, Fischer-Book

A multilingual natural-history dictionary compiled by Philipp Andreas Nemnich, designed to correlate the names of natural substances across numerous European and other languages. The work covers animals, plants and minerals, giving equivalent vernacular terms and variant names rather than serving primarily as a descriptive natural-history treatise. For gemological research, it is particularly useful for tracing historical names of gemstones, minerals and ornamental stones across different languages and identifying synonyms that appear in older scientific, commercial and lapidary literature. The Allgemeines Polyglotten-Lexicon der Naturgeschichte is therefore an important bibliographical and terminological aid for studying eighteenth-century mineral and gemstone nomenclature.