Nephrite jade was considered more valuable than gold or silver. Nephrite jade in New Zealand is known as "pounamu" in the Māori language, and is highly valued, playing an important role in Māori culture. It is considered a "taonga", or treasure, and therefore protected under the Treaty of Waitangi. The exploitation of it is restricted to Ngai Tahu and closely monitored. The South Island of New Zealand is "Te Wai Pounamu" in Māori — "The [land of] Greenstone Water" — because that is where it occurs. Weapons and ornaments are made of it; in particular the "mere" (short club), and the
Theory of forms of the Form of Beauty: "It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself," (211b). And in the "Timaeus" Plato writes: "Since these things are so, we must agree that that which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, "nor itself enters into anything anywhere", is one thing," (52a, emphasis added). According to Plato, Socrates postulated a world of ideal Forms, which he