“Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal, which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines.”

— William Gilbert (astronomer) , book De Magnete

English translation by Silvanus P. Thompson (1900).
De Magnete (1600)

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William Gilbert (astronomer) 7

English physician, physicist and natural philosopher 1544–1603

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