Anno 1655, I desired Dr. W. Harvey to tell me how flints were generated. He sayd to me that the black of the flint is but a natural vitrification of the chalke: and added that the medicine of the flint is excellent for the stone, and I thinke he said for the greene sicknesse; and that in some flints are found stones in next degree to a diamond. The doctor had his armes and his wife’s cutt in such a one, which was bigger than the naile of my middle finger; found at Folkston in Kent, where he told me he was borne. In the stone-brash country in North Wilts flints are very rare, and those that are found are but little. I once found one, when I was a little boy learning to read, in the west field by Easton Piers, as big as one’s fist, and of a kind of liver colour. Such coloured flints are very common in and about Long Lane near Stuston, [Sherston?—J. B.] and no where else that I ever heard of. It is reported that at Tydworth a diamond was found in a flint, which the Countess of Marleborough had set in a ring. I have seen small fluores in flints (sparkles in the hollow of flints) like diamonds; but when they are applied to the diamond mill they are so soft that they come to nothing. But, had he that first found out the way of cutting transparent pebbles (which was not long before the late civill warres) kept it a secret, he might have got thousands of pounds by it; for there is no way to distinguish it from a diamond but by the mill. I shall conclude with the stones called the Grey Wethers; which lye scattered all over the downes about Marleborough, and incumber the ground for at least seven miles diameter; and in many places they are, as it were, sown so thick, that travellers in the twylight at a distance take them to be flocks of sheep (wethers) from whence they have their name. So that this tract of ground looks as if it had been the scene where the giants had fought with huge stones against the Gods, as is described by Hesiod in his {Gk: theogonia}.