CURIOSITIES 165 
in which to make a perfectly tight jo. 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 
