VEINSTONES. 



is a compound mineral concretion of various co- 

 lours, appearances, and degrees of hardness, and 

 not unfrequently of various colours in the same 

 mass, though white often prevails. This com- 

 pounded stony concretion is called by miners a 

 rider, perhaps from its riding the vein, or sepa- 

 rating it longitudinally into two or more divisions. 

 This mineral stone is hard and heavy, sometimes 

 compact and solid, but frequently cracked and 

 cavernous, rising in irregular and mishapen masses, 

 and generally exceeding hard. A rider frequent- 

 ly contains a variety of different substances or 

 species, as well as different, colours, in the same mass, 

 such, as spar, quartz, fragments of the rocks near 

 the vein, sometimes pyrites, and often ore in grains 

 and flowers, and sometimes different ores, as lead, 

 copper, &c. in the same mass, and all these strong- 

 ly coagulated or concreted together by a whitish or 

 a brownish- white substance, resembling quartz and 

 agate, which seems to have enveloped the several 

 articles in the composition when the whole was in 

 a fluid state. I call this veinstone, as I think the 

 term should be the most intelligible to naturalists, 

 it being always found in veins, upon the super- 

 ficies of them, and in fragments and masses lying 

 about upon the face of the ground, which have 

 slidden, or been forced off, the superficies of veins. 

 But the veinstone does not always contain so great 



