in Natural History, is either native or factitious.

The native cinnabar is an ore of quicksilver, moderately compact, very heavy, and of an elegant striated red colour. See Mineralogy Index.

Factitious cinnabar is a mixture of mercury and sulphur sublimed, and thus reduced into a fine red glebe. The best is of a high colour, and full of fibres like needles. See Chemistry Index.

The chief use of cinnabar is for painting. Although the body is composed of sulphur, which is of a light colour, and mercury, which is white as silver, it is nevertheless of an exceeding strong red colour. Lumps of it are of a deep brown red without brilliancy; but when the too great intensity of its colour is diminished by bruising and dividing it into small parts, (which is a method generally used to lessen the intensity of all colours), the red of the cinnabar becomes more and more exalted, flame-coloured, and exceedingly vivid and brilliant; in this state it is called vermilion.

Cinnabar is often employed as an internal medicine. Hoffman greatly recommends it as a sedative and antispasmodic, and Stahl makes it an ingredient in his temperant powder. Other intelligent physicians deny that cinnabar taken internally has any medicinal quality. Their opinion is grounded on the insolubility of this substance in any menstruum. This question concerning its internal utility cannot be decided without further researches and experiments; but cinnabar is certainly used with success to procure a mercurial fumigation, when that method of cure is proper in venereal diseases. For this purpose it is burnt in an open fire on red-hot coals, by which the mercury is disengaged and forms vapours, which, being applied to the body of the deceased person, penetrate through the pores of the skin, and produce effects similar to those of cinnabar mercury administered by friction.