Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

having on his head a crimson sattin cap, laced from the top downward and round about, under that a white linnen night cap with a border, and over that a black hat with a broad rybon and ruffe-band, thick couched with a lace, and a pair of skie-coloured silk stockings, and a paire of three soaled shoes." Do. 150.

223. Meteorolithes.

The sky-stone in New Mexico is mentioned by Humboldt, whose book has reached me since the ac count of it given by Gaspar de Villagra was printed in a former volume (No. 98). "In the environs of Durango, he says, is to be found insulated in the plain the enormous mass of malleable iron. and nickel, which is of the identical composition of the aerolithos which fell in 1751, at Hraschina, near Agram, in Hungary. Specimens were communicated to me by the learned director of the Tribunal de Mineria de Mexico, Don

Fausto d'Elhuyar, which I deposited in different cabinets of Europe, and of which M. M. Vauquelin and Klaproth published an analysis. This mass of Durango is affirmed to weigh upwards of 1900 miriagrammes, which is 400 more than the aerolithos discovered at Olumpa in the Tucuman, by M. Rubin de Celis. A distinguished mineralogist, M. Frederick Sonnenschmidt, who travelled over much more of Mexico than myself, discovered also in 1792, in the interior of the town of Zacatecas, a mass of malleable iron of the weight of 97 myriagrammes, which in its exterior and physical character was found by him. entirely analogous with the malleableiron described by the celebrated Pallas." Political Essay. Black's transla tion, Vol. 2, p. 292.

Humboldt's account reduces the size of the Mexican sky-stone something: more than half; still it remains greatly larger than any other which has been yet discovered.

The mass of pure iron found in the nterior of the Cape Colony, which Mr. Barrow supposes to have been the thick part of a ship's anchor, carried there from the coast by the Kaffers, is far more probably a sky-stone. It is remarkable that Mr. Barrow should be so well satisfied with his solution of the difficulty as to apply it in another instance, where the aerial origin of the mass appears certain. "We were told (he says,) that in the neighbourhood of the Knysna, another large mass of native iron had been discovered, similar to that which I mentioned to have seen in the plains of the Zuure Veldt, and which I then supposed the Kaffers to have carried thither from the sea shore. I paid little attention to the report at that time, but since my return to the Cape, the discovery of a third mass, in an extraordinary situation, the very summit of Table Mountain,

* Travels in South Africa, Vol. 1, p. 226,

excited a stronger degree of curiosity. I imagined the first to have been the flat part of an anchor, although it was destitute of any particular shape; but in this of Table Mountain, which may weigh from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty pounds, there appeared some faint traces of the shape of the flook, or the broad part of the arm which takes hold of the ground. It was found half buried in sand and quartz pebbles, every part, as well under as above ground, much corroded, and the cavities filled with pebbles, which however did not appear to be component parts of the mass, not being angu lar, but evidently rounded by attrition. As, in the first instance, I suppose the Kaffers to have carried the mass into the situation it was discovered in; so also with regard to the latter, I am inclined to think it must have been brought upon the summit of the mountain by the native Hottentots, as to a place of safety,

when Bartholomew Diaz, or some of the early Portugueze navigators, landed first in this country. Others, however, who have seen and examined the mass, are of opinion, that it must have been placed in its present situation at a period long antecedent to the discovery of the Cape, of Good Hope by Europeans. Be that as it may, the Neptunean appearances of various parts of Southern Africa, which are particularly striking in the formation of the Table Mountain, press. strongly on the recollection the beau tiful observation of the Latin poet:

Vidi ego, quod fuerat quondam solidissima tellus
Esse fretum. Vidi factas ex æquore terras,
Et procul a pelago conchæ jacuere mariɑæ,
Et vetus inventa est in motibus auchora summis."

[ocr errors]

Vol. 2, P. 79

Paracelsus, in his treatise De Meteoris, has a curious section, De Lapide e Cœlo,* in which, mingled with some strange: and daring er os, he hits upon the true solution of the phænomenon. Lapidum

« ForrigeFortsæt »