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 certainly 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, in 

 Ireland, I gathered nodules winch, 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 greywacke, 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 like a marine plant, 



