156 
being found in great plenty on a mountain near Giinserode, in the 
neighbourhood of Frankenhausen ; which mountain obtains its name 
from St. Boniface, the tutelar saint of the Thuringians. The West- 
phalians have also called them Hiinuthrcenens ; the vulgar having 
considered them as the petrified tears of giants. Those which have 
acquired a degree of thickness beyond some others, have been named 
Lcipidcs CQScifovTnes, from their cheese-hke shape , or Muhlsteincs, from 
their supposed resemblance to a mill-stone in miniature . and those 
whose length rather exceeds their width, have been termed Mo- 
dioli lapidei, from their bearing in miniature the shape of a bushel 
measure. When their sides were tumid or convex, they were, from 
their cask shape, called CadittE, Volvol(B doliatcB, and VolvolcE utriculatcB , 
and from their surface bearing a resemblance to a wheel, they have been 
termed Rotula lapidea. 
In some parts of England, they are called Fairy-stones; and in others, 
St. Cuthbert’s heads, owing to their central foramen allowing them to 
be strung like the beads of a rosary ; but the general term by which 
they are known by the admirers of fossils, is that of Trochites. ^W^hen 
conjoined together by their flat surfaces, in a columnar form, the series 
is termed Entrochus. 
Agricola* speaks of trochitce, lapides judaicce, and similar stones being 
found in the fissures of the spotted, and of the whitish ash-coloured 
marble. Because, he says, this kind of marble being wetted, the 
water filters, so that such stones are formed by that which separates 
from it. But because marble is for the most part hard, and but little 
is separated from it by the water, these stones, therefore, aie but 
small, and are frequently forced out of these fissures by the force of 
the water.-j- 
Not only the names and the descriptions, but this opinion, of Agri- 
cola, respecting the formation of these fossils, were long adopted by 
* De Natura Fossilum, P. 256. 
t De Ortu et Causis Subterr. Lib. IV. P. 513. 
