CUBIOSITIES 16 



in which to make a perfectly tight join. The Chinese 

 are excellent workmen, and could do all this work very- 

 well indeed when they liked, but I found that they 

 required continual watching, otherwise they were apt 

 to scamp the work. They could not understand, either, 

 the value I set on my collections, and therefore did not 

 see the necessity for all the care I insisted upon having 

 bestowed on them. 



Many objects of great curiosity are found in Ichang, 

 and are much valued by the Chinese as well as by the 

 Europeans. Among them may be mentioned a very 

 hard and dense black stone, in which iron pyrites occurs 

 in lumps of irregular sizes and shapes. These stones 

 are beautifully decorated in relief with human figures, 

 animals, or plants, the pyrites being most cleverly 

 brought in as eyes, ornaments, fruits, or flowers. The 

 largest that I saw might be about thirty inches by 

 twenty-four, and they are executed in many smaller 

 sizes. The stone itself resembles compact lava, but I 

 am unable to say what it is. 



Another curiosity is what is called the pagoda stone, 

 and is a species of belemnite with concave sections. 

 They are nearly always brought in as sections cut in 

 the natural block of stone in which they occur. This 

 stone being of a dark colour and the fossil that is em- 

 bedded in it white, or nearly so, and sometimes as 



