1. A name applied to certain precious stones spotted or streaked with red, supposed in former times to have the power of staunching bleeding, when worn as amulets; particularly the modern HELIOTROPE, a green variety of jasper or quartz, with small spots of red jasper looking like drops of blood; also the heliotrope of Pliny, ‘a leek-green stone (prase or plasma) veined with blood-red (jasper), the latter so abundant as to give a general red reflection to the whole when it was put in water in the face of the sun.’ Dana.
1551. T. Wilson, Logike, 43. The bloodstone stoppeth blood.
1587. in Wadley, Bristol Wills (1886), 251. To the said Thomas my bloode stone.
1685. Lond. Gaz., No. 2040/4. Lost … a Necklace of Green Blood-stones.
1747. Dingley, Gems, in Phil. Trans., XLIV. 505. The Blood-Stone, is green, veined or spotted with red and white.
1874. Westropp, Prec. Stones, 51, 113.
1879. Cassell’s Techn. Educ., IV. 309/2. The opaque [stones], white and coloured, such as the opal, the sardonyx, the agate, the onyx, the blood-stone.
2. Hematite, a red iron-ore. (Perhaps only in Dicts., as a verbal rendering of hæmatītes, applied by Pliny also to the gem: see HEMATITE).
1864. in Webster.
1880. Lewis & Short, Lat. Dict., Hæmatites, bloodstone, a kind of red iron-ore.
