CINNABAR, in natural history, is either native or fictitious. The native cinnabar is an ore of quick-silver, moderately compact, very heavy, and of an elegant, striated red colour. In this ore the quick-silver is blended in different proportions with sulphur. It is so rich an ore, as to be no other than mercury impregnated with a small quantity of sulphur, just enough to reduce it to that state, being commonly more than six parts of mercury to one of sulphur; and even the poorest cinnabar yields one half mercury: it is of a very bright, glittering appearance, when fresh broken, and is usually found lodged in a bluish, indurated clay, though sometimes in a greenish talc stone.
For the method of separating mercury from cinnabar, see MERCURY.