638 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO IJll. 



which I have yet by me, and which agrees exactly in its dark colour, light- 

 ness, &c. with peat earth. And on examination of this by a microscope, I 

 found the light proceeded from many small half transparent whitish live worms^ 

 which lay in it. 



The blackness of the oak, in such bogs, in my opinion, arises from the 

 vitriolic juices of the earth soaked into the oak, which being astringent is 

 turned black by them. Ink is made of galls, an astringent excrescence of a 

 sort of oak in Turkey, made by an insect there; and of green vitriol, which is 

 made of the pyrites dissolved by rain water, and iron. Earth of all sorts, and 

 even human calculi, and the ashes of vegetables, have in them particles of 

 iron, in greater or less quantities. The pyrites is also very common. The 

 particles of iron coming to be dissolved by this pyrites, subacid, or other salts, 

 dissolved by water, or perhaps by water itself, and carried into these bogs, 

 there fasten to the tree, soak into it, and turn it black. These particles in 

 some river water, fastening to the oak timber floated in it, give the same a 

 darkish colour ; as noticed by Mr. Pepys, in his Naval Memoirs of England, 

 p. 71, where we are told by the chief ship-builders of England, that the 

 best foreign plank for the Royal Navy was brought either from Dantzic, Quin- 

 borough, that is Koningsberg, or Riga, of the growth of Poland and Prussia, 

 or from Hamburgh ; namely, that sort which is shipped from thence of the 

 growth of Bohemia, distinguished by its colour, as being much blacker than 

 the other, and rendered so, as is said, by its long sobbing in the water, during 

 its passage thither. 



In the turf bogs of Ireland 14 feet deep, are found not only the mouse-deers 

 horns, mentioned in one of these transactions, but likewise their whole skele- 

 tons, wherein the bones bear the same proportion to the like bones of other 

 deer, as the horns bear to their horns. There are also found in them, gold 

 chains, pieces of money, and roots of heath, several musci, or mosses, and 

 branches of trees so soft, as to give no resistance to the turf spade: and I was 

 told, that in cutting turf in one, they at several feet deep cut through what 

 the Irish call a ruskin of butter, which was a firkin, or vessel, made of the 

 barks of trees, used by the old Irish for putting up their butter. And I re- 

 member, that in digging the wet dock at Deptford, there were found at the 

 bottom, about Q feet deep, grass leaves, hazle-nuts, and roots of trees ; and 

 there also was found a piece of money, as they called it ; but on examination, 

 it proved to be a leaden seal, to some bull of Pope Gregory IX, who continued 

 Pope from a. d. 1227 to 1241. 



From Leland's Itinerary, vol. v. p. 13, &c. written in the reign of king 

 Henry the 8th, we may learn the common opinion in his days, of the cause of 



