blood-stone
(ˈblʌdstəʊn)
1. A name applied to certain precious stones spotted or streaked with red, supposed in former times to have the power of staunching bleeding, when worn as amulets; particularly the modern heliotrope, a green variety of jasper or quartz, with small spots of red jasper looking like drops of blood; also the heliotrope of Pliny, ‘a leek-green stone (prase or plasma) veined with blood-red (jasper), the latter so abundant as to give a general red reflection to the whole when it was put in water in the face of the sun.’ Dana.
| 1551 T. Wilson Logike 43 The bloodstone stoppeth blood. 1587 in Wadley Bristol Wills (1886) 251 To the said Thomas my bloode stone. 1685 Lond. Gaz. No. 2040/4 Lost..a Necklace of Green Blood-stones. 1747 Dingley Gems in Phil. Trans. XLIV. 505 The Blood-Stone, is green, veined or spotted with red and white. 1874 Westropp Prec. Stones 51, 113. 1879 Cassell's Techn. Educ. IV. 309/2 The opaque [stones], white and coloured, such as the opal, the sardonyx, the agate, the onyx, the blood-stone. |
2. Hematite, a red iron-ore. (Perhaps only in Dicts., as a verbal rendering of hæmatītes, applied by Pliny also to the gem: see hematite).
| 1864 in Webster. 1880 Lewis & Short Lat. Dict., Hæmatites, bloodstone, a kind of red iron-ore. |