the Collegio Romano.  One specimen bears an inscription which signifies that, by the authority of Augustus, the weight was preserved in the temple of the goddess Ops, the wife of Saturn, and one of the most ancient deities of Italy, where the public money was deposited.  Montfaucon, in the third volume of his learned and elaborate work on Antiquity, has a plate illustrating a number of characteristic specimens of these weights from the cabinet of St. Germain’s.  This previous use would lead us to suspect that all the stones in the Roman churches did not figure in scenes of martyrdom.  Some of them, indeed, were found in the loculi or graves of the Catacombs; but this circumstance of itself does not prove that the body interred therein had been that of a martyr, and that the stone had been employed in his execution.  We know that the early Christians were in the habit of depositing in the graves of their friends the articles that were most valued by them during life.  And hence, in the Catacombs, a singular variety of objects have been found.  Stone weights, therefore, may have been put into the graves of Christians, not as instruments of suffering but as objects typical of the occupation of the departed in this life, in accordance with the habit of their pagan forefathers, which the Roman Christians had adopted.  Some, however, of the stones, as I have said, may have been used according to the popular legend for the drowning of martyrs; and these weights were conveniently at hand in places of public resort, and lent themselves readily, by the rings inserted in many of them, to the persecutor’s purpose.

The material of which they are composed is in nearly all cases the same.  It is a stone of extreme hardness and of various shades of colour, from a light green to a dark olive, with a degree of transparency equal to that of wax and susceptible of a fine polish.  By some writers it is called a black stone; but this colour may have been given to it by frequent handling when in use, and by the grime of age since.  It was called by the Romans, from the use made of it in fabricating measures of weight, lapis aequipondus, and from its supposed efficacy in the cure of diseases of the kidneys lapis nephriticus.  Fabreti says that it got the name of lapis Lydius from the locality from which it was believed to have come.  It is a kind of nephrite or jade, a mineral which usually occurs in talcose or magnesian rocks.  At one time it was supposed to exist only on the river Kara-Kash, in the Kuen Luen mountains north of Cashmere, and for thousands of years the mines of that locality were the only known worked ones of pure jade.  It has since, however, been found in New Zealand and in India; while the discoverers of South America obtained specimens of it in its natural state from the natives of Peru, who used it for making axes and arrow-heads, and gave it the name of piedra de yjada, from which comes our common word jade, on account