a name given by the ancients to certain dyes and paints. By this name they called a purple sea plant used by them in dyeing woollen and linen articles of that colour. It was very beautiful, but fugitive, and in a short time wholly disappeared. Such is the account given of it by Theophrastus.

The women of those times also used a substance called fucus, with which they stained their cheeks red; and many have supposed, from the same word expressing both dyes, that they were the same. But this, on a strict inquiry, proves not to be the case. The Greeks called everything fucus which would stain or paint the flesh. But this peculiar substance used by the women to paint their cheeks was distinguished from the others by the name of rizion among the more correct writers, and was in fact a root brought from Syria into Greece. The Latins, in imitation of the Greek name, called this root radicula; and Pliny very erroneously confounds the plant with the radix lunaria, or struthion of the Greeks.

The word fucus was in those times become such an universal name for paint, that the Greeks and Romans had a fucus metallicus, which was the ceruse employed in painting the neck and arms white; after which they used the purpurissum, or red fucus of the rizium, to colour the cheeks. In later times they also used a peculiar fucus or paint for the purpose, prepared of the creta argentarria, or silver-chalk, and some of the rich purple dyes that were in use at that time. This seems to have been a colour something resembling our rose-pink.