Here’s another page of stones. There are now four in all, collected from ones I’ve found since beginning this exploration. You can find the others if you click the 3 bars icon at the head of the page, after which click ‘stone of the day’.

And here to introduce these latest treasures, are the opening lines from Roger Caillois’s book, ‘The Writing of Stones’ first published in 1913:

‘Just as men have always sought after precious stones, so they have always prized curious ones, those that catch the attention through some anomaly of form, some suggestive oddity of colour or pattern. This fascination almost always derives from a surprising resemblance that is at once improbable and natural. Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error and access. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation.

For a stone represents an obvious achievement, yet one arrived at without invention, skill, industry, or anything else that would make it a work in the human sense of the word, much less a work of art. The work comes later, as does art; but the far-off roots and hidden models of both lie in the obscure yet irresistible suggestions in nature.’

(Translated by Barbara Brey, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville)