“President Young exhibited the Seer’s stone with which the Prophet Joseph discovered the Plates of the Book of Mormon, to the regents this evening. It is said to be a silecious granite dark color almost black with light colored stripes some what resembling petrified poplar or cotton wood bark It was about the size but not the shape of a hen’s egg.”

Hosea Stout diary – 25 February 1856, in Juanita Brooks, On the Mormon Frontier: The Diaries of Hosea Stout, 1844-1861 – Volume 2 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, c. 1964), 593.