in antiquity, a sort of stone coffin or grave, wherein the ancients laid those they had not a mind to burn.

The word, as derived from the Greek, literally signifies *flesh-eater*; because at first they used a sort of stone for the making of tombs, which quickly consumed the bodies. See the following article.

or *Lapis Albus*, in the natural history of the ancients, a stone much used among the Greeks in their sepultures, is recorded to have always perfectly consumed the flesh of human bodies buried in it for forty days. This property it was much famed for, and all the ancient naturalists mention it. There was another very singular quality also in it, but whether in all, or only in some peculiar pieces of it, is not known: that is, its turning into stone any thing that was put into vessels made of it. This is recorded only only by Mutianus and Theophrastus, except that Pliny had copied it from these authors, and some of the later writers on these subjects from him. The account Mutianus gives of it is, that it converted into stone the shoes of persons buried in it, as also the utensils which it was in some places customary to bury with the dead, particularly those which the person while living most delighted in. The utensils this author mentions, are such as must have been made of very different materials; and hence it appears that this stone had a power of confirming not only flesh, but that its petrifying quality extended to substances of very different kinds. Whether ever it really possessed this last quality has been much doubted; and many, from the seeming improbability of it, have been afraid to record it. What has much encouraged the general disbelief of it is, Mutianus's account of its taking place on substances of very different kinds and textures; but this is no real objection, and the whole account has probably truth in it. Petrifications in those early days might not be distinguished from incrustations of spar and stony matter on the surfaces of bodies only, as we find they are not with the generality of the world even to this day; the incrustations of spar on mosses and other substances in some of our springs, being at this time called by many petrified mosses, &c., and incrustations like these might easily be formed on substances enclosed in vessels made of this stone, by water passing through its pores, dislodging from the common mass of the stone, and carrying with it particles of such spar as it contained; and afterwards falling in repeated drops on whatever lay in its way, it might again deposit them on such substances in form of incrustations. By this means, things made of very different matter, which happened to be inclosed, and in the way of the passage of the water, would be equally incrustated with and in appearance turned into stone, without regard to the different configuration of their pores and parts.

The place from whence the ancients tell us they had this stone was Assos, a city of Lycia, in the neighborhood of which it was dug; and De Boot informs us, that in that country, and in some parts of the East, there are also stones of this kind, which, if tied to the bodies of living persons, would in the same manner consume their flesh. Hill's Notes on Theophrastus, p. 14.