Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Another method (Steep the bone or ivory during)
Steep the bone or ivory during five or six days, in water of galls with ashes made with dried dregs of wine and arsenic; then give it two or three layers of the same black, with which plumtree is blackened in order to imitate ebony. Or dissolve silver in aqua-fortis, and put into it a little rose water. Rub the ivory with this and allow it to dry in the sun.
Green -- This colour is imparted to ivory or bone by a solution of copper or verdigris in aqua-fortis, or by grinding together two parts of verdigris and one of sal-ammoniac.
Purple. -- Take four ounces of aqua-regia, and one of sal-ammoniac. Yellow. -- Ivory, bone, horn, &c. may de staned yellow, by previously boiling them in a solution of one pound of alum, in two quarts of water, then immersing them for half an hour in a liquor, prepared by boiling half a pound of tumeric in a gallon of water, until it be reduced to hree quarts, and afterwards plunging the coloured substance into alum water. Blue. -- All bony matters may be stained blue, by first tinging them with green, and then dipping them into a hot and strong solution of pearl-ashes.