374 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



pass over it contract in a perceptible degree its peculiar taste 

 and odour. With a little more time to spare, I would fain 

 have made this breccia of the Old Red the subject of a few- 

 simple experiments. I would have ground it into powder, 

 and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hot infusion. 

 Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks and bot- 

 tles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance \ but 

 it is quite possible that a little of the rock, to which the water 

 owes its qualities, might, when treated in this way, have all 

 the effects of a considerable quantity of the spring. It might 

 be of some interest, too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, 

 as a soil, or its effect on other soils ; whether, for instance, 

 like the old sterile soils of the Carboniferous period, it has 

 lost, through its rock-change, the fertilizing properties which 

 it once possessed ; or whether it still retains them, like some 

 of the coprolitic beds of the Oolite and Greensand, and might 

 not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A course of 

 such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable 

 occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, 

 who have to linger long, with but little to engage them, wait- 

 ing for what, if it once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, 

 when it returns at all. 



In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme 

 of infusing rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to 

 the circumstance that the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, 

 when ground into powder, imparts to boiling water a pecu- 

 liar taste and smell, and that the infusion, taken in very small 

 quantities, sensibly affects both palate and stomach. And I 

 suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old, when 

 the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of 

 bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the 

 ancient superstition might thus embody, as ancient supersti- 

 tions not unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I 

 said, might amount to no more than simply the administra- 



