The substance thus designated in the Authorized Version is in Hebrew called Chasmil and was probably a composition of several sorts of metal, since even the term by which the word is rendered by the Greeks frequently signifies a composition of gold and silver. The ancients were acquainted with the art of amalgamating various species of metal; and the Latin aurichalcum is said to have possessed the brightness of gold and the hardness of copper, and might not improbably have been our present platina, which has been re-discovered in the Ural mountains, after having long been known as an American fossil. It is not improbable that this was the metal termed 'fine copper' (Ezra 8:27).