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BOOK VII
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167
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being found only in Ethiopia by people who know how to search for it.18 There
are certain springs and rivers that will petrify gloves, bones and
other substances that are thrown into them without changing the
original shape. "And bones, dissolving, wasting away with the body
often" having been changed into stone have been found recently near a
certain river that flows from a mountain falsely named for the pine
tree it is supposed to support. They have found bones of animals
changed to stone in the aluminous earth of Hildesheim, They have found
the petrified bones of some marine monster as well as the teeth of fish
in a similar black and unctuous earth near Lunenberg. This earth is
used in making bricks. Theophrastus has written, according to Pliny's
translation into the Latin, that bones are produced within the earth
and bone-like stones are to be found there also. Mutianus has written
that mirrors, skin scrapers, clothing and sandals were changed into
stone when left in a quarry in Troy. When trees and roots, bones and
other objects are changed into stone they become very hard. The stream
from a fountain in Parparus makes the earth stone-like when it sinks
into it because of a petrifying juice and it is in this same manner
that earths along underground channels are made stone-like when they
absorb the water flowing along the channel. The stones which have
congealed from this petrifying juice alone, either within the earth or
outside it, are usually soft and fragile. Such stones hang from caverns
and underground passages in those localities I have already mentioned
in Book II of De Natura Eorum Quae Effluunt Ex Terra. A small
rivulet near a small fountain in Cepusius has been changed into a soft
white stone in this manner. A similar soft white stone settles from the
warm water of underground channels or hangs from the back of the
channels in the form of icicles. This stone is called tofus because it is porous. The Greeks call it πώρος. Pliny has named it pumex. Stones
have been found near the hot springs of Karl the Fourth composed of a
large number of units cemented together. The units are as porous as a
honey-comb, hemispherical and the size of a pea. They formed from
dripping hot water.19
Earthen
vessels are found within the earth with the neck commonly constricted
and the body swollen. They may have one, two or three handles and some
have lids. They are dug up in many places but particularly in
Ferteslieb, Saxony, near the village of Matthias Schulenberg in a
vineyard about two miles from the castle of Sricca. They are also
found in Lusatia near the town of Liben, ten miles from Lucca; in
Thuringia on Mt. Seberg, a spear's throw from Stein, a citadel of the
Vicelebi. The ignorant and uneducated people of Saxony and Lusatia have
been persuaded that these vessels have been produced within the earth
while the people of Thuringia have been led to believe that the dwarfs
who formerly inhabited an excavation on Mt. Seberg used them. Actually
they are jars
18 This must refer to black or dark colored petrified wood and possibly concretions. 18 Pisolite, a variety of limestone composed of small hemispherical concretions.
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