This fruit with its shell, is, as Clusius says, an inch and a half in length, but is somewhat more than an inch thick. Its shell or membraneous covering, is about the thickness of the blade of a knife, and outwardly of an ash colour mixed with brown. Clusius was in the right to say, that the shell of this nut was formed of several fibrous parts, but those fibres resemble rather those of the shell of a coco, than the fibrous parts of the back of the areca nut. He, moreover, has very properly observed, that this shell is armed, at its lower part, with a double calyx and that the opposite part terminates in a point; but it is necessary to observe, that this point is not formed by the prolongation of the shell, as the figure he has given of it seems to specify; but that from the middle of the upper part of the fruit, there juts out a sort of small needle. The shell being taken off, the nut is found to be hard, ligneous, oblong, of unequal surface, furrowed, and of a chesnut yellow. One of its extremities is roundish, and the other, by the reunion and prolongation of three sorts of tubercles, terminates in a point; those protuberances being so formed, that the middlemost placed between the two others, has the appearance of a nose, and the two lateral protuberances resemble flat lips. On each side of that which forms what we call the nose, a small hole or nook is perceived, capable of containing a pea; but does not penetrate deep, and is surrounded with black filaments, sometimes like eye-brows and eyelashes, so that the nut on that side resembles an ape or a hare. This _lusus naturae_, or sport of nature, has a very pretty effect, but is oftener found in stones than other substances. A great variety of such rare and singular productions of nature may be seen at the British Museum: but nothing can be more extraordinary in this respect than what is related concerning the agate of Pyrrhus, which represented, naturally, Apollo holding a lyre, with the nine muses distinguished each by their attributes. In all probability, there is great exaggeration in this fact, for we see nothing of the kind that comes near this perfection. However, it is said, that, at Pisa, in the church of St. John, there is seen, on a stone, an old hermit perfectly painted by nature, sitting near a rivulet, and holding a bell in his hand; and that, in the temple of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, there is to be seen, on a white sacred marble, an image of St. John the Baptist, cloaked with a camel's skin, but so far defective that nature has given him but one foot.