in Antiquity, a sort of stone coffin or grave, in which the ancients deposited the bodies of the dead which were not intended to be burned. The word, as derived from the Greek, literally signifies flesh-eater, because originally a kind of stone was used for tombs, which quickly consumed the bodies. One of the most celebrated specimens of antiquity is the great sarcophagus, which is commonly called the tomb of Alexander the Great. It fell into the hands of the British at the capitulation of Alexandria in Egypt in 1801, and is now deposited in the British Museum.

or Lapis Assius, in the natural history of the ancients, a stone much used amongst the Greeks in their sepulchres, is recorded to have always perfectly consumed in forty days the flesh of human bodies buried in it. This property it was much famed for, and all the ancient naturalists mention it. There was also another very singular quality in it, but whether in all, or only in some peculiar pieces of the stone, is not known; that is, its turning into stone any thing that was put into vessels made of it. This is recorded 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 not only had a power of consuming flesh, but its Sarco-

petrifying quality extended to substances of very different kinds. Whether it ever really possessed this last quality has been much doubted.