lydian stone

Lydian stone, or black jasper, a variety of siliceous or flinty slate, of a grayish or bluish black color.

There is, also, a hard smooth stone, called Lydian stone, or flinty jasper, by the mineralogists, and touchstone by the jewelers, on which gold makes a certain mark; and the character of the streak made on such a stone will indicate pretty well the purity or value of the gold that makes it.

It contains nearly an equal quantity of black flinty slate, or lydian stone, and white quartz in its composition, and greatly resembles the friable sandstones of the lignite formation at the mouth of Bear Lake River. 186In some parts the soil has a red colour from the disintegration of a reddish-brown slate-clay. 187The summits of the hills that were visited were thinly coated with loose gravel, composed of smooth pebbles of lydian-stone, intermixed with some pieces of green felspar, white quartz, limestone, and chert.

The beds were on fire when we visited them, and the burnt clays, vitrified sand, agglutinated gravel, &c. gave many spots the appearance of an old brick-field. 81The gravel interstratified with the lignite, consists of smooth pebbles of Lydian stone, of flinty slate, of white quartz, of quartzose sandstone, and conglomerate, like the sandstones and conglomerates of the old red sandstone formation, of claystone, and of slate-clay, varying in size from a pea to that of an orange.

Some boulders of lydian stone strew the beach.