Lignum nephriticum

The wood is capable of turning the color of water it comes in contact with into beautiful opalescent hues that change depending on light and angle, the earliest known record of the phenomenon of fluorescence.

[1] Water drunk from such cups, as well as imported powders and extracts from lignum nephriticum, were thought to have great medicinal properties.

[2][3] The lignum nephriticum derived from Mexican kidneywood was known as the coatli, coatl, or cuatl ("snake water") or tlapalezpatli ("blood-tincture medicine") in the Nahuatl language.

Similarly, the lignum nephriticum cups made from narra wood were part of the native industry of the Philippines before the arrival of the Spanish.

In the most famous surviving manuscripts of the work, the Florentine Codex, Sahagún called it by its Nahuatl name, coatli, given by Aztec healers.

[4] In 1570, Francisco Hernández de Toledo, the court physician of King Philip II of Spain, led what is considered the first scientific expedition to the Americas.

However, he expressed uncertainty as to its origin, stating that while he was told the source plant was a shrub, he had personally also witnessed specimens that reached the size of very large trees.

[1][4] In 1646, Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit scholar residing in Rome, published an account of his experiments on lignum nephriticum in his work Ars Magna Lucis et Umbræ.

In the dark, however, or in an opaque vase, it will once more assume its blue color.A second cup was described by in 1650 by the Swiss botanist Johann Bauhin in his great work Historia plantarum universalis.

Bauhin observed that when water was poured into the cup with the wood shavings, the water shortly turned into "a wonderful blue and yellow color, and when held up against the light beautifully resembled the varying color of the opal, giving forth reflections, as in that gem, of fiery yellow, bright red, glowing purple, and sea green most wonderful to behold."