720 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1672. 



shall soon be able to write my thoughts more fully, which will, I think, be suf- 

 ficient to refute the feble of the Tarantula.* 



An account of the Aponensian Baths near Padua, communicated by the 



same Mr. Doddington, in a Letter dated Fenice, March 18, 1672. 



A^" 83, p. 4067. 



Five miles from Padua are the waters called Aponensia, from the town 

 Aponum, famous in antiquity, and among others frequently mentioned by Livy. 



1st, The waters are very hot. 2dly, They are stinking. 3dly, They yield a 

 great deal of very fine salt, of which the natives serve themselves in their ordi- 

 nary occasions. This salt is the thing I think most considerable there. It is 

 gathered in the following manner : the natives, after sun set, stir pieces of wood 

 in the water, and presently the salt sticks to them, and comes off in small flakes 

 exceedingly white. This never loses its savour. The people there with the same 

 water wash their walls to render them whiter than ordinary, which has an effect 

 superior to lime. Such walls retain their saltness a few days only, and then be- 

 come insipid, even though they exude a white excrescence, in thin and light 

 flakes like nitre, many years after. But that salt which is collected from the 

 stones, gravel and earth, by which the rivulets, descending from those baths do 

 run, is without any taste of salt ; though there be no difference in the form or 

 colour from that which is gathered with the wooden instrument. 



Reflections made by P. Francisco Lana, S, J. on an Observation of 

 Signor M. Antonio Cjstagna, concerning the formation of Crystals : 

 translated from the XI. Venetian Giornale de Litter ati. N" 83, 

 ^.4068. 



In the month of September last, being arrived in the Val Sabbia at a place 

 called le Mezzane, where I knew those crystals to be generated, I observed in a 

 spacious meadow, on a hillock, some narrow places bare of all herbs, in which 

 alone those crystals are produced, being all hexangular, both points of them ter- 

 minating in a pyramidal figure hexangular likewise. 



I was told that they were produced from the dews, because being gathered 



* The common opinion relative to. the bite of the Tarantula^ and its cure by music, is now suffi- 

 ciently exploded. 



The small, sudden, and painful swellings, mentioned in the latter part of tliis paper, seem rather 

 to resemble the supposed effects of that highly singular animal tlie Furia Inf emails of Linnaeus, the 

 history of which is still but obscurely understood. 



