VOL. X.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 225 



surprise. But by reason of it, many good grooves are not worked in the best 

 and most profitable time of the year, when the subterraneous waters are at the 

 lowest. The workmen fancy it proceeds from the multitude of red trefoil flow- 

 ers, called honey- suckles, with which the limestone meadows in the Peake do 

 much abound. 



The third is the strangest and most pestilential of any. Those who have seen 

 it (for it is visible) describe it thus: — In the highest part of the roof of those 

 passages, which branch out from the main groove, they often see a round thing 

 hanging, about the size of a foot-ball, covered with a skin of the thickness and 

 colour of a cobweb. If by any accident, as the splinter of a stone, or the like, 

 this be broken, it immediately disperses itself, and suffocates all the company. 

 Therefore, to prevent its ill effects, as soon as it is observed, by the help of a 

 stick and a long rope, they break it at a distance ; after which they purify the 

 place well by fire before they dare enter it again. To accouivt^r it in some- 

 degree, they say, the steam which arises from their bodies and the candles, 

 ascend to the highest part of the vault, and there condenses, and in time has a 

 film grows round about itj and at length corrupting becomes pestilential. 



The fourth, which they also call a damp, is that vapour, which being touched 

 by their candle, presently takes fire, and giving a report like a gun produces the 

 like effects, or rather those of lightning. 



As to the vomiting of worms: A girl in Shcf^eld, about eight months old, 

 was taken with violent vomiting fits, which continued about a week, and made 

 her so weak, that her parents began to despair of her recovery. On giving her 

 about a pint of wormwood ale, she vomited three hexapodes, of the size and 

 shape, fig. 4, pi. 9, all very active and nimble. The girl in a short time re- 

 covered, and was well. The surgeon brought the hexapodes to me; we killed 

 one of them with trying experiments upon it. Remembering I had seen some 

 very like them, which devoured the skins of such birds as I kept dried for Mr. 

 Willughby, I gave each of the surviving hexapodes the head of a shining atri- 

 capella, which in about five weeks time they eat up, bones, feathers and all, 

 except the extremities of the feathers and the beaks. Desiring to see what they 

 would turn into, I gave them a piece of larus, but that it seems agreed not so 

 well with them, for they died within two days. 



I have often been puzzled to account for those phsenomena, commonly called 

 fairy-circles. * I have seen many of them, and those of two sorts; one sort 



* I am satisfied that the bare and brown, or highly cloathed and verdant circles in pasture fields, 

 called Fairy Rings, are caused by the growth of the agaricus orcades. The largest of one of these 

 rings, in Edgbaston-park, was 18 feet diameter, and about as many inches broad, in the periphery 



VOL. II. G 6 



