the ground all in their armour like the soldiers
of Cadmus.

It had been taught that there was a great
subterranean flood into which, under Mount
Caucasus, subterraneous rivers poured, and that
through underground channels this flood sent
water to the mountain-tops, whence it came
forth in springs, and with the water some of its
crabs. Thus all the crabs of the upper world
were, some said, fresh water, until they became
accustomed to the sea. But of this, says Dr.
Sachs, every man is free to think as he pleases.

Nor were those wonderful crabs and
shellfish hard as marble clearly dead. Sperling had
defended Martin Kerger's opinion that stones
might be alive and have some power of
reproduction. Borellus had found a stone sea-urchin
full of little ones of the same sort; and several
authorities have reported finding adamants with
young. Dr. Sachs holds it unquestionable that
stones are found with young, but that they ever
give birth to their young is for him hard to
believe. Living frogs, toads, and crabs had
been found in stone, and Grembs had observed
that the vital power and longevity of a toad
was such that it would not petrify in petrifying
waters.

Wonderful things have been found in stone;
as, for example, the agate of King Pyrrhus,
which showed in colour the Nine Muses dancing
with Apollo. In a church at Venice there was
a perfect picture of a skull in jaspar, and Our
Lord on the Cross, shown in veins of marble so
distinctly that the wounds and blood-drops could
be exactly discerned. Gaffarell said he had seen
in Western Tartary men, camels, and cattle all
of stone, which Ortelius thought to be living
men and cattle suddenly petrified by a
stupendous metamorphosis. A petrified horde, with
arms and chariots all turned into stone, was
said to cover a considerable region by the marsh
Kitaya, between Russia and Tartary; and
Cornelius Wietflietius said that in the mountains of
a certain province (called Chilensis, perhaps
that of the Cileni, of Tarragona in Spain), when
the south wind blows, it stiffens whole troops
of horsemen suddenly as into statues of stone,
and they remain in the road just as they stood
before the transformation. Thus it would
appear that wind as well as water can have
petrifying power, and there were many testimonies to
the existence of a whole city that had been so
petrified. The same thing, adds the doctor,
happened in our time, in the year sixteen 'thirty-
four, on a part of the African shore of the
Mediterranean, where the whole district was petrified,
men, animals, trees, household furniture, grain,
and food, being all turned into stone. The event
was attended with great crashings in the air
and frequent earthquakes.

With all this power of turning real life into
stone, it seemed hardly worth while to credit
Nature, as she was credited two centuries ago,
with sportive imitation of men's teeth and hands,
or with the modelling of a whole torso out of
marble. Dr. Sachs gives in his book a picture
of a stone hand sent to him by Count Hatzfeldt
for his own museum. The figure looks very
much like three fingers and part of a hand of a
man dead of the gout, with unlimited chalk-
stone. These sports of nature, as they were
considered, were said to be designed to show
that all things are contained in all, and that all
things seek ultimate perfection in the figure of
man, who is made after the divine image. Even
the sun, moon, and stars are imaged in selenite.

Very curious, too, was the old argument on
the varieties of petrifying water: Dr. Sachs,
perhaps because his own name petrified in the
breath of Latin as Saxum a stone, giving us a
great deal more upon this favourite topic than
the crusty skin of his crabs and the discovery
also of petrified crabs quite warranted. Only
he takes leave to observe concerning petrified
crabs found in the rock on the tops of
mountains, that some call them sports of nature,
some say they were petrified by the rising of
subterranean waters. But as crabs are only
found in rock-producing places, because
elsewhere they could not get material for the crust
of their shells, it is no great wonder that they
should, in some such places, be found converted
altogether into rock. Whence he presently
digresses into a discussion of the recent wonder
of a stag killed by the huntsmen of Count John
Philip, of Hanover, on the twenty-fifth of
October, sixteen hundred and sixty-one, at his seat
of Bobenhausen, in the stomach of which stag
was found a stone serpent. Upon that wonder,
the learned and noble F. J. Burrhus had
reported that stags had long repute for swallowing
snakes as a means of longevity; that mystics
also knew the little diadem before a snake's
head to be produced gradually in long time by
the digestion of terrestrial vapours, and that
this diadem, cooked by a gentle heat with
certain herbs, had power to petrify the herbs. It
was this part of the snake, then, which by
digestion in the warm stomach of the stag, with
the herbs on which the stag had pastured,
petrified the serpent's body into a theriacal stone, of
which, said the learned Burrhus, a small portion
duly blended with assisting drugs would give
new life and strength to the aged; and the dose
of the stone of this serpent might rise to as
much as five-and-twenty grains.

Upon all which, says Dr. Sachs, and as to
the amount of trust to be put in it, judgment is
free. The practical reserve that he blends with
much unavoidable trust in the science of his
time, the taste, not extinct yet, and never to be
extinct, for curious and surprising speculation,
and the constant desire for clear and direct
testimony and experiment, make the book of this
Silesian physician a very good representative of
the science of Europe at its great turning-
point. That point was reached when Bacon
had represented in England clearly and strongly
the practical end to be kept in view, and the
right method of study by observation and
experiment, avoiding blind reliance on traditional
opinions.

Doctor Sachs, however, is a learned gossip,
too full of curious reading to keep any