350 



TABLE-TALK AND VARIETIES. 



which he afterwards carried out, 

 namely, that when every brother of 

 the quill failed him, he would keep 

 his own counsel, and would himself 

 quietly compose a poem for every 

 one of the authors who had made half 

 or whole promises and broke them ! 

 Accordingly, he began with Byron, 

 writing the " Guerilla Chief," a 

 story in the Spenserian stanza, and 

 followed it by specimens of Scott, 

 Southey, Wordsworth, "Wilson, and 

 I forget who more, till at last he 

 made up a volume, which was pub- 

 lished under the title of the Poetic 

 Mirror. John Ballantyne, who not 

 only loved a joke, but delighted in 

 mystification, made the most of this 

 notable jeu d 'esprit, bringing his 

 customers into the dilemma of ad- 

 mitting either that the poems were 

 genuine, or else that James Hogg, 

 having produced the whole alone 

 and unassisted, must be the most 

 wonderful shepherd that ever tended 

 a flock. And he managed so well, 

 that within six weeks, he handed 

 over thirty pounds to the author, 

 far more, I suppose, than he ever 

 gained by the first edition of the 

 Queen's Wake. (Memoirs of a Li- 

 terary Veteran.) 



AEROLITES IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 



One of the first series which at- 

 tracts attention in the department 

 of minerals in the natural history 

 collection of the Museum, is that of 

 specimens of meteoric bodies dis- 

 covered in various parts of the 

 world. The origin of these sub- 

 stances, which have received the 

 name of aerolites or meteoric stones, 

 is one of the enigmas of science. 

 They are conjectured to belong to 

 the same class of bodies as shooting- 

 stars and fire-balls, which are sup- 

 posed to revolve round the sun, in 

 obedience to the laws of gravitation, 

 with the velocity of planets; but 

 coming within range of the influ- 

 ence of the earth, project fragments 

 of their masses through our atmo- 



sphere, and which descend with a 

 noise like thunder. This pheno- 

 menon has been observed from re- 

 mote periods, and in all quarters of 

 the globe ; and probably it often 

 occurs unseen or unrecorded, in 

 parts of the world which are unin- 

 habited, or tenanted only by unci- 

 vilized men, and doubtless also the 

 aerolites are frequently discharged 

 unobserved into the sea. The ear- 

 liest found of any of the specimens 

 deposited in this curious collection 

 is a portion of a mass of iron which 

 fell at Agram, in Croatia, in 1751. 

 The nest in point of time was dis- 

 covered between ten and twenty 

 years later in Senegal, in Africa; 

 the third is a large fragment of & 

 mass of Siberian iron discovered on 

 the summit of a mountain, and 

 weighing originally about 1680 

 pounds. There is also a portion of 

 a mass weighing upwards of 3300 

 pounds found in Rhenish Prussia ; 

 a large specimen from Buenos Ayres, 

 sent by Sir Woodbine Parish in 

 1826 ; specimens from the Cape of 

 Good Hope, North and South 

 America, including the United 

 States, Brazil, Mexico, and Texas ; 

 two specimens from Brandenburg 

 and Bohemia, and one from Ten- 

 nessee, all three found in 1847. Of 

 meteoric stones, consisting generally 

 of native iron alloyed with nickel, 

 there is a specimen which fell in 

 Alsace in 1492 ; specimens found 

 in various parts of the Continent 

 from 1723 to 1798 ; one which fell 

 at Possil, Glasgow, April 5, 1804, 

 and many others. Huinboldt men- 

 tions that the proportion of native 

 iron contained in specimens of me- 

 teoric iron brought by him from 

 Mexico was as high as 96 per cent. ; 

 but in other aerolites instanced by 

 him the proportion of pure met.'il 

 scarcely amounted to 2 per cent. 

 Berzelius discovered, on analysing 

 these meteoric bodies, that they 

 contained fifteen of the chemical 

 elements, which are distributed 



