that the "stones" found at Bina were lignite, or some related nonasphaltic pyrobitumen, though the fact that Theophrastus mentions lignite separately in section 16 makes this identification somewhat unlikely.
13. spinos. The only other ancient work in which this mineral substance is named seems to be the De Mirabilibus Auscultationibus. Here it is briefly mentioned in two separate passages. The passage in section 33 may be translated as follows: "And in Thracian Bithynia the so-called spinos is found in mines, and they say that fire is kindled from it." And section 41 states that spinos burns when it is cut up and put together again and sprinkled with water.
Since Bithynia was the name of a province in Asia Minor, it might seem that a geographical contradiction exists in the first of these two passages, but it is clear from an account of Strabo58 that there were Bithynians living in Thrace, and in fact the inhabitants of the province of Bithynia originally came from Thrace to Asia Minor. Both these passages show, therefore, that spinos was a combustible mineral substance found in Thrace.
The behavior of spinos when moistened with water suggests that it was the same mineral substance as the Thracian stone mentioned by various ancient authors, such as Nicander,59 Dioscorides,60 and Pliny.61 Hence spinos appears to have been an early name for Thracian stone. Though it is impossible to identify it with any degree of exactness, spinos or Thracian stone was probably some kind of asphaltic bitumen. Some have suggested that Thracian stone was lignite or brown coal,62 and others have identified it as ordinary bituminous coal,63 or, in an attempt to account for its peculiar behavior with water, as coal containing pyrite.64 The conjecture of Stephanides65 that it was an asphaltic
58 XII, 3, 3.
59 Theriaca, 45.
60 V, 146 (Wellmann ed., V, 129). Wherever the Materia Medica of Dioscorides is mentioned, the first reference is to the German translation of Berendes and the second is to Wellmann's edition.
β1 ΧΧΧΙΠ, 94.
62 J. D. Dana, System cj Mineralogy (New York, 1909), p. 1024.
es Forbes, Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity, Table I.
64 H. O. Lenz, Mineralogie der alien Griechen und Rbmer (Gotha, 1861), p. 18.
65 Μ. Κ. Stephanides, The Mineralogy of Theophrastus (in Greek), (Athens, 1896), p. 211.
