Appearance
The gum varied in color depending on the condition of the original tree. It also depended on where the gum had formed and how long it had been buried. Colors ranged from chalky-white, through red-brown to black; the most prized was a pale gold, as it was hard and translucent. The size of each lump also varied greatly. Swamps tended to yield the small nuggets known as "chips", whereas the hillsides tended to produce larger lumps. The majority were the size of acorns, although some were found which weighed a few pounds; the largest (and rarest) were reported to weigh half a hundredweight. Kauri gum shares a few characteristics with amber, another fossilised resin found in the Northern Hemisphere, but where amber can be dated as millions of year old, carbon-dating suggests the age of most kauri gum is a few thousand years.
Read more about this topic: Kauri Gum
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“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.”
—R.G. (Robin George)
“Look into the world—how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man’s affliction, taking shelter behind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)