The print shown here is from the Book of Wonderful Characters, and is a reproduction from an etching made by Hollar in 1641.
Doctor Bulwer, in his Artificial Changeling, tells a preposterous story of Battalia's being born with two pebbles in one hand and one in the other; that he refused both the breast and the pap offered him, but ate the pebbles and continued to subsist on stones for the remainder of his life.

Doctor Bulwer thus describes his manner of feeding: His manner is to put three or four stones into a spoon, and so putting them into his mouth together, he swallows them all down, one after another; then (first spitting) he drinks a glass of beer after them.
He devours about half a peck of these stones every day, and when he clinks upon his stomach, or shakes his body, you may hear the stones rattle as if they were in a sack, all of which in twenty-four hours are resolved.

Once in three weeks he voids a great quantity of sand, after which he has a fresh appetite for these stones, as we have for our victuals, and by these, with a cup of beer, and a pipe of tobacco, he has his whole subsistence.
From a modern point of view the Doctor "looks easy." The Book of Wonderful Characters continues: Platerus speaks of a beggar boy, who for four farthings would suddenly swallow many stones which he met with by chance in any place, though they were big as walnuts, so filling his belly that by the collision of them while they were pressed, the sound was distinctly heard.

Father Paulian says that a true lithophagus, or stone-eater, was brought to Avignon in the beginning of May, 1760.

He not only swallowed flints an inch and a half long, a full inch broad, and half an inch thick, but such stones as he could reduce to powder, such as marble, pebbles, etc., he made up into paste, which to him was a most agreeable and wholesome food.