524 I'HILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1 70O, 



luvian sea and lakes, so that part of the country about Broughton appears mani- 

 festly to have been, in the antediluvian world, the bottom of some fresh water 

 lake, because those are fresh water shell-fish that are found there, and the bed 

 on which they breed was a fine blue clay, which is the colour of the stone to 

 this day. Which bed, by the power of the subterraneous steams and effluvia, 

 was turned by degrees into stone with all the fishes therein. 



I have also a hard stone, part of the same blue quarry, with little bits of 

 wood-coal in it, and whole leaves of vaccinia, or whortle-berries, such as grow 

 on heath; andMr. Llwydand the Miscel. Cur. in Germany, have given several 

 large accounts of whole leaves and plants found in stones and rocks, and deep 

 in the bowels of the earth, some folded, some plain, some imperfect, ail of 

 which is very easily solvable, by their being in that general hurry and confu- 

 sion seized upon, and embodied in lumps of clay and other matter, while 

 others were caught and intercepted in rolling beds of earth, as they tumbled 

 down from rising hills and mountains, and so were lodged deep in chasms of the 

 ground, and petrified. 



Concerning a Stone cut out of the Bladder, ivith Hair on it, &c. By Dr. J. 

 Wallace, F.R.S. N°266, p. 688. 



I am sorry I can give so ill an account of those things you wrote of to me r 

 For that of Sir William Elliot's voiding hair with his urine, at several times, I 

 had from Sir Archibald Stevenson and Dr. Pitcairn, his physicians ; and after 

 his death I saw with the Doctor the stone that was taken out of his bladder, 

 which was about the size of a goose's egg; the stone was hard and heavy, 

 and for the most part covered over with a scurf, not unlike the lime-mortar of 

 walls, and in the chinks of the scurf there were some hairs grown out. It was 

 thought the other hairs he voided in his life-time, which were a great many, 

 and some of an extraordinary length, grew out of that stone, because when 

 the hairs hung out of his penis, as they did frequently, to his great torment, 

 they were obliged to pull them out, which was always with a resistance as if 

 plucked out by the root. It was from Dr. Pitcairn that I had the discovery of 

 the cheat of those stones that an account was sent you of, and which you pub- 

 lished in the Phil. Trans. No. 141. The particulars of that story I have quite 

 forgotten ; as all I remember is, that Dr. Pitcairn was at the pains to find out 

 the imposture ; and it was discovered at last that a roguish boy, to be kept 

 from school, had so much cunning as to impose on a fond mother and other 

 people. 



