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the difference of their nature, they might be entirely exempt from 

 the other effects of the bituminizating process. 



In one specimen, which I possess, containing vegetable matters, 

 the little fragments of moss, and the other particles which are so 

 small as not to furnish the means of judging to what plants, or 

 even to what parts of plants, they belong, do not appear to have 

 suffered the least change, nor to have made the least approach to 

 transparency, excepting one or two pieces, in which it may be 

 readily accounted for, by their extreme thinness and natural prone- 

 ness to pellucidness. Not having suffered that change, which this 

 hypothesis supposes the containing mass to have undergone, it 

 seems fair to conclude, that these matters must have been intro- 

 duced after this particular process had been accomplished in the 

 amber itself, and are therefore preserved, like the insects, in the 

 same state as when first entombed. 



Let us not refuse instruction whenever it is offered to us, and 

 especially when, by duly attending to it, we may escape the sus- 

 pended lash, necessarily held in readiness to check the prompt and 

 presumptive theorist. The specimen of amber to which I have 

 alluded, besides substances decidedly vegetable, and others too 

 equivocal to determine whether they are parts of vegetables or of 

 insects, contains two flies. One of these appears to be in as per- 

 fect a state of preservation as when living ; the legs being collected 

 nearly in a point, and stretched to their length, as though the 

 flowing bitumen had secured the imprisonment of the little captive, 

 during its active exertions to raise himself from the treacherous 

 surface. The other, on the contrary, appears to have lost its na- 

 tural colours, and possesses very nearly the transparency, which is 

 very considerable, of the amber itself; as if it had undergone a 

 similar change with the substance which contains it. If it had 

 been a leaf instead of a fly, what would have become of our pro- 



