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Book V about lodestone, hematite, geodes, hematite, selenite, lapis secularum, asbestos, mica

Book V about lodestone, hematite, geodes, hematite, selenite, lapis secularum, asbestos, mica Page of 251 Book V about lodestone, hematite, geodes, hematite, selenite, lapis secularum, asbestos, mica Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
100
DE NATURA FOSSILIUM
pie dedicated to St. Maurice is located a stone is found in a marble quarry that is called pentagonos because it has five angles and a similar stone which has six angles is called hexagonos. Each is white, one and one-half inches wide, tabular but having a hollow in the middle and the rim raised as on a gaming board. There is a hole in the middle of the hollow from which radii extend to the outer rim as on trochites. In the same place they find rhombites (calcite) the size of a chestnut or walnut. This mineral is white, covered on all sides with small conspicuous scales and with each side oblique giving it the appearance of a rhomb from which the mineral takes its name. Another variety of rhombites is found at Galgenberg. It is commonly four and one-half inches long, one and one-half inches wide and three-quarters of an inch thick. It has the form of a compressed cylin­der but the striae of both the upper and lower portions intersect in such a way that they produce more ridges in the center that also have the form of a rhomb.29
At a depth of one hundred and thirty feet in a mine at Salfeld, Thu-ringia, a stone was found that had the appearance of a solid breast bone, one and one-half feet long, eight and one-half inches wide, four and one-half inches thick at the front part where the ribs were fastened, two inches thick at the back where the middle perforated vertebra occurred. The spine was missing from it because the marrow of the bone was squeezed out. On the outside the stone was either black or gray, on the inside the color of Arabian marble. Nature had produced this extraordi­nary thing.
I shall return now to those substances which Nature produces abun­dantly in one place or in many places with the same characteristics. To this class belong the stones that resemble fish roe and occur in the glutinous earths found in veins, stringers and lenses in rocks. Earth, being denser than water, produces more imperfect forms that lack life. Stones of this genus are found in Germany at Hildesheim, Saxony, and enclosed in rocks in many localities which I shall mention in their proper place.
Strombites (fossil gastropoda) resembles the shell of a snail since it tapers from a wide to a narrow coil in the form of a top with a right-handed spiral. It is sometimes short, sometimes nine inches long. It is white inside but assumes the same color on the outside as that of the earth in which it forms. It is found at Hildesheim, Saxony, in the quarries of Galgenberg and in the new portion of that city where they were digging wine cellars, between the watch tower of Alfeld and the road to Embecca and in the limestone quarries of Hanover.
Ctenites3" is striated and has the general form of a comb. It is usually gray and is found in the quarries of Hildesheim on the far side of Mt. Mortiz.
29 This is probably the first description of a vicinal form on a crystal. '" Probably a fossil pecten.
Book V about lodestone, hematite, geodes, hematite, selenite, lapis secularum, asbestos, mica Page of 251 Book V about lodestone, hematite, geodes, hematite, selenite, lapis secularum, asbestos, mica
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