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DE NATURA FOSSILIUM
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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.
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