The Account Of A Petrifying Quality In The Earth Here, Though Some
Will Have It To Be In The Water Of A Spring Hard By, Is Very
Strange.
They boast that their town is walled and their streets
paved with clay, and yet that one is as strong and the other as
clean as those that are built or paved with stone.
The fact is
indeed true, for there is a sort of clay in the cliff, between the
town and the Beacon Hill adjoining, which, when it falls down into
the sea, where it is beaten with the waves and the weather, turns
gradually into stone. But the chief reason assigned is from the
water of a certain spring or well, which, rising in the said cliff,
runs down into the sea among those pieces of clay, and petrifies
them as it runs; and the force of the sea often stirring, and
perhaps turning, the lumps of clay, when storms of wind may give
force enough to the water, causes them to harden everywhere alike;
otherwise those which were not quite sunk in the water of the
spring would be petrified but in part. These stones are gathered
up to pave the streets and build the houses, and are indeed very
hard. It is also remarkable that some of them taken up before they
are thoroughly petrified will, upon breaking them, appear to be
hard as a stone without and soft as clay in the middle; whereas
others that have lain a due time shall be thorough stone to the
centre, and as exceeding hard within as without.
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