More on the source of succinum, or amber, which was not recorded above

ALTHOUGH many weighty authors hardly agree at all about the source of succinum, or amber, and the profitability of gathering it, yet Cassiodorus, in Bk V, Ch. 2 of his Letters, where he is writing to the Aestii,² seems to have hit upon its true nature more accurately than others have done, for he says: 'This amber, as one reads in the writing of a certain Cornelius, trickles down from the sap of a tree found on islands in the midst of the Ocean, and from that it is called succinum, and is gradually solidified by the heat of the sun.