pyramid, built of great square stones of fluor spar, straight up; and here are the three little pinnacles of mischievous quartz, which have set themselves, at the same time, on the same foundation; only they lean like the tower of Pisa, and come out obliquely at the side and here is one great spire of quartz which seems as if it had been meant to stand straight up, a little way off; and then had fallen down against the pyramid base, breaking its pinnacle away. In reality, it has crystallized horizontally, and terminated imperfectly: but, then, by what caprice does one crystal form horizontally, when all the rest stand upright? But this is nothing to the phantasies of fluor, and quartz, and some other such companions, when they get leave to do anything they like. I could show you fifty specimens, about every one of which you might fancy a new fairy tale. Not that, in truth, any crystals get leave to do quite what they like; and many of them are sadly tried, and have little time for caprices-poor things!

MARY. I thought they always were either in play or in mischief! they?

looked as if they What trials have

L. Trials much like our own. Sickness, and starvation; fevers, and agues, and palsy; oppression; and old age, and the necessity of passing away in their time, like all else. If there's any pity in you, you must come to-morrow, and take some part in these crystal griefs.

DORA. I am sure we shall cry till our eyes are red.

L. Ah, you may laugh, Dora: but I've been made grave, not once, nor twice, to see that even crystals 'cannot choose but be old' at last. It may be but a shallow proverb of the Justice's; but it is a shrewdly wide

one.

DORA (pensive, for once). I suppose it is very dreadful to be old! But then (brightening again), what should we do without our dear old friends, and our nice old lecturers?

L. If all nice old lecturers were minded as little as one I know of

DORA. And if they all meant as little what they say, would they not deserve it? But we'll come-we'll come, and cry.

LECTURE IX.

CRYSTAL SORROWS.

Working Lecture in Schoolroom.

L. WE have been hitherto talking, children, as if crystals might live, and play, and quarrel, and behave ill or well, according to their characters, without interruption from anything else. But so far from this being so, nearly all crystals, whatever their characters, have to live a hard life of it, and meet with many misfortunes. If we could see far enough, we should find, indeed, that, at the root, all their vices were misfortunes: but to-day I want you to see what sort of troubles the best crystals have to go through, occasionally, by no fault of their own.

This black thing, which is one of the prettiest of the very few pretty black things in the world, is called Tourmaline.' It may be transparent, and green, or red, as well as black; and then no stone can be prettier (only, all the light that gets into it, I believe, comes out a good deal the worse; and is not itself again for a long while). But this is the commonest state of it,-opaque, and as black as jet.

MARY. What does Tourmaline' mean?

L. They say it is Ceylanese, and I don't know Ceylanese; but we may always be thankful for a graceful word, whatever it means.

MARY. And what is it made of?

L. A little of everything; there's always flint, and clay, and magnesia in it; and the black is iron, according to its fancy; and there's boracic acid, if you know

what that is; and if you don't, I cannot tell you today; and it doesn't signify: and there's potash, and soda; and, on the whole, the chemistry of it is more like a mediæval doctor's prescription, than the making of a respectable mineral: but it may, perhaps, be owing to the strange complexity of its make, that it has a notable habit which makes it, to me, one of the most interesting of minerals. You see these two crystals are broken right across, in many places, just as if they had been shafts of black marble fallen from a ruinous temple; and here they lie, imbedded in white quartz, fragment succeeding fragment, keeping the line of the original crystal, while the quartz fills up the intervening spaces. Now tourmaline has a trick of doing this, more than any other mineral I know: here is another bit which I picked up on the glacier of Macugnaga; it is broken, like a pillar built of very flat broad stones, into about thirty joints, and all these are heaved and warped away from each other sideways, almost into a line of steps; and then all is filled up with quartz paste. And here, lastly, is a green Indian piece, in which the pillar is first disjointed, and then wrung round into the shape of an S.

MARY. How can this have been done?

L. There are a thousand ways in which it may have been done; the difficulty is not to account for the doing of it; but for the showing of it in some crystals, and not in others. You never by any chance get a quartz crystal broken or twisted in this way. If it break or twist at all, which it does sometimes, like the spire of Dijon, it is by its own will or fault; it never seems to have been passively crushed. But, for the forces which cause this passive ruin of the tourmaline,-here is a stone which will show you multitudes of them in operation at once. It is known as 'brecciated agate,' beautiful, as you see; and highly valued as a pebble: yet, so far as I can read or hear, no one has ever looked at it with the least attention. At the first glance, you see it is made of very fine red striped agates, which have been broken into small pieces, and fastened to

gether again by paste, also of agate.

There would

be nothing wonderful in this, if this were all. It is well known that by the movements of strata, portions of rock are often shattered to pieces :-well known also that agate is a deposit of flint by water under certain conditions of heat and pressure: there is, therefore, nothing wonderful in an agate's being broken; and nothing wonderful in its being mended with the solution out of which it was itself originally congealed. And with this explanation, most people, looking at a brecciated agate, or brecciated anything, seem to be satisfied. I was so myself, for twenty years; but, lately happening to stay for some time at the Swiss Baden, where the beach of the Limmat is almost wholly composed of brecciated limestones, I began to examine them thoughtfully; and perceived, in the end, that they were, one and all, knots of as rich mystery as any poor little human brain was ever lost in. That piece of agate in your hand, Mary, will show you many of the common phenomena of breccias; but you need not knit your brows over it in that way; depend upon it, neither you nor I shall ever know anything about the way it was made, as long as we live.

DORA. That does not seem much to depend upon. L. Pardon me, puss. When once we gain some real notion of the extent and the unconquerableness of our ignorance, it is a very broad and restful thing to depend upon you can throw yourself upon it at ease, as on a cloud, to feast with the gods. You do not thenceforward trouble yourself,-nor any one else,with theories, or the contradiction of theories; you neither get headache nor heartburning; and you never more waste your poor little store of strength, or allowance of time.

However, there are certain facts, about this agatemaking, which I can tell you; and then you may look at it in a pleasant wonder as long as you like; pleasant wonder is no loss of time.

First, then, it is not broken freely by a blow; it is slowly wrung, or ground, to pieces. You can only