32 HISTORY OF BRITISH ZOOPHYTES. 
removed, and they stand forth in their nakedness as true 
vegetables,—so that the mineralogists must give them up. 
Nor would those who favoured the theory of crystalliza- 
tion have less to say; for certaimly there are crystallizations 
which have every appearance of belonging to the vegetable 
kingdom. ‘There are agates which go under the name of 
moss-agates, and there are the pretty native mocha-stones, 
some of which I have collected in the north of Ireland, 
which contain what have all the appearance of beautiful 
mosses, though it is now well known that they are mineral 
crystallizations. In a limestone quarry at Moneymore, im 
Ireland, I gathered nodules which, on the purely white 
calcareous ground, had, in dark colours, drawn by the 
inimitable pencil of Nature, figures which one might have 
taken for impressions of some of tne finest specimens of 
muscology in the antediluvian world. At the lead-mines 
at Carsphairn, in Galloway, I got a dendritic crystallization 
of manganese, one of the finest I had ever seen. The stone 
was greywacké, but, as if to prepare the canvas for the 
intensely black pencilling of manganese, there was on the 
stone a white calcareous coating on which the figure was 
laid in a branching way, three inches in length and two in 
breadth, like a little shrub, or rather lke a marine plant, _ 
