The Bologna stone and the nature of light : the Science academy of Bologna / Susana Gomez.
Abstract:
The Bologna stone was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one of the best presents that a scientist could receive. Its power to emanate light in the dark was in the period a phenomenon difficult to explain. Like many others "natural curiosities" phosphorus became an experimental subject of the different theories of light and matter. Alchemists, chemists, cartesians and newtonians interpreted the phosphorescence of the Bologna stone with their very different explication models. Particularly at the Sciences Academy of Bologna the phosphorus constituted in the eighteenth century a good example of the newtonianism diffusion and at the same time of the experimental method to which all scientific theories might be submitted
Nuncius A. 6, fasc. 2 (1991), p. 3-32