ACCOUNT OF STONE IMAGE FEOM TENNESSEE. 385 



wliicli, if I have not lost all my Latin, means Julia Mamaea, daughter of 

 Caia, lived thirty years. 



The Empress Julia Mamaea was not the daughter of Caia, but of Julia 

 Soemias ; the legend on her tomb should therefore be I. FIL, and not 

 C FIL. Then she was killed in Gaul with her son Alexander, in a 

 mutiny of the soldiers, on the same day. 



According to the best authorities, he was just thirty years old when 

 this event took place. None make him more than thirty-three. Assum- 

 ing the least probable as the date, then, if the sarcophagus at Carlisle 

 College be that of the mother of Alexander Severus, she must have given 

 birth to her son when she was but three years old, which is, to say the 

 least, unusual. 



In brief, that the sarcophagus now deposited at the Smithsonian In- 

 stitution was taken from an ancient cemetery at Beirut, in Syria, and 

 brought to the United States by Commoclore J. D. Elliott, in the frigate 

 Constitution, and by him deposited in the Patent Office, and thence 

 transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, would be a plain and truth- 

 ful label to put on the relic. 



ACCOIIIT OF THE DISCOVERY OF A STOXE IMAGE IN TENNESSEE, NOW IN 

 POSSESSION OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 



By Edw. M. Grant. 



Nashville, Tennessee, August 12, 1868. 

 The history of its discovery is as follows : Near Strawberry Plains — 

 a station of the East Tennessee and Virginia Eailroad, about sixteen 

 miles east of Knoxville, Tennessee — there is a cave, one of the many 

 hundreds of those natural curiosities that are to be found in the belt of 

 country lying between the Ohio Eiver on the north and Northern Mis- 

 sissippi, Alabama, and Georgia on the South, the Mississippi River on 

 the West, and the Atlantic Ocean. This cave is in the direct line of 

 march of De Soto's expedition to the Mississippi River ; many of his 

 forts, and other traces, being still visible at the present day in that sec- 

 tion of country. In the early spring of 1867 I had a force of men build- 

 ing the large bridge over the Holston River at Strawberry Plains ; and 

 during one of the various visits that I made to the work I saw this stone 

 image, which hadjust been found in the cave referred to, about one-half 

 mile from its mouth, I think, by a man named Douglas, who was wan- 

 dering about in the cave one Sunday. It was attached to a stalactite 

 or stalagmite at the back of the head, where a fresh portion of the rock 

 can now be observed, evidently having been chiseled from one of the 

 formations mentioned, an operation that required considerable skill and 

 patience, as the red Tennessee marble, which it is cut from, is very hard, 



and its crystalline formation renders it very difidcult to carve. Douglas 

 25 s 



