PHILADELPHIA-Stones. a name which some authors
have given to what is otherwise called Christian bones,
found in the walls of that city. It is a vulgar error
that these walls are built of bones; and the tradition
of the country is, that when the Turks took the place,
they fortified it for themselves, and built their walls of
the bones of the Christians whom they had killed there.
Dr Smyth in one of his epistles, mentions this wall as
an instance of Turkish barbarity. This idle opinion has
gained credit merely from a loose and porous stone of
the soapy kind, found in an old aqueduct, which is still
in the wall. Sir Paul Rycourt brought home pieces of
these stones, which even he supposed to have been bones,
but they proved on examination to be various bodies,
chiefly vegetable, incrustated over and preserved in a
spar of the nature of that which forms incrustations in
Knareborough spring, and other places with us. These
bodies are often cemented together in considerable num-
bers by this matter, and their true shape lost in the con-
geries, till a diligent and judicious eye traces them re-
gularly.