102 
rotten wood : on which, if oil be poured, it burns ; but when the oil 
is burnt away, the burning of the stone ceases, as if it were in itself 
not liable to such accidents^. 
The description which Galen gives of certain black stones, brought 
by him out of Coelosyria, seems to accord very exactly with the Bovey 
Coal, or surturbrand. He describes them as being broad like a 
board, and on being put into the fire, burning with a slender flame. 
They were generated, he says, in the hills on the east side of the 
Dead Sea, where the bitumen is produced, and the smell of the 
stone was like bitumenf. 
Agricola mentions several places in which bituminous wood has 
been found, but is most particular in his account of that which is 
found in a celebrated mountain in Misena, not far from the city of 
Zuicca, where, he says, after digging about a step deep through 
common earth, they find an extensive vein of soft coal, about three 
steps and a half deep, and then cutting through a tolerably thick 
stone, they again arrive at coals, but these are hard, and have ob- 
tained the name of pitch coal, from their blackness and brightness. 
Under this vein they find a bituminous metallic earth, beneath which 
are scattered aluminous pyrites, coal, &c. 
Valerius Cordus relates §, that light, dry wood, black like coal, 
is dug out of the mountains of Marienbergen, at the depth of forty 
orgyia. 
Schoockius describes the fossil wood of Meizlibizen, as being of 
the same kind as that of which we are here treating of. He says, 
speaking of it under the conviction of its being entirely of mineral 
origin, that it is exceedingly like to vegetable wood ; but, that the 
* Theophrastus, History of Stones, translated by Sir John Hill, p. 67. 
-j- De Simplicium Medicamentorum Facultat. lib. ix. 
J De Natura Fossilura, Basil, mdlviii. lib. vii. p. 325. 
§ Valerii Cordi Observationes quaedam Rerum naturalium variarum, et primum Fossilium 
in Germania, mdlxi. p. 217. 
