Miscellanies. 383 
“ 
became sick and perished, and on examination the nest was found to 
be crowded with acari of large size. 
Poultry which run about in stony or paved yards, wear away the 
points of their claws by friction and digging, which renders them un- 
fit to penetrate their coating of feathers; they are, therefore, more 
covered with vermin, and in consequence more sickly than fowls 
from the country.—Jour. of Roy. Inst. Feb. 1831. 
NOTICES AND COMMUNICATIONS. 
1. Copper Ore of Strafford, Vt. &c., extracted from a letter to 
Mr. C. U. Shepard, from Mr. Richardson of Franconia, N. H. Sept. 
26, 1831. tie 
I have not any thing new to write respecting my works—the mag- 
netic machine* continues to answer a valuable purpose. Mr. Brown- 
ing has recently put one of his machines in operation, in Peru, which 
brings into use an ore bed that was before worthless. I am making 
about the same quantity of iron that I have been, say two tons per 
week—and also at the lower works, every thing goes on as it did 
when you was here. 
The copper mine at Strafford, is owned by the Vermont Mineral 
Company, to which company the copperas works also belong. The 
copper is in the same hill with the copperas ore, called Mount Pros- 
pect or Copperas hill. ‘They have driven a drift into the hill hori- 
zontally, to the distance of three hundred and thirteen feet, with a 
very slight inclination, just sufficient to admit the running off of the 
water, and a fathom in height and width—at the termination of this 
distance is excavated a large chamber, say forty feet in diameter by 
fifteen feet in height, and from this chamber proceed six other drifts 
of twelve, eighteen, twenty five, thirty, fifty and sixty feet in length. 
The copper ore is promiscuously connected with copperas ore, and 
the vein of copperas ore in which copper is found, is at seventy feet 
in width ; from the chamber above alluded to, there is a perpendic- 
ular air shaft one hundred-feet in height to the surface of the hill— 
there are twelve miners at work, all of whom blast by the contract, so 
much a cubic fathom—the ore after it is blasted is taken out of the 
mine in a car working on a rail road laid the whole distance of the 
main drift, and when arriving at the mouth of the mine, the copper 
* See Vol. xv111, p. 289, of this Journal. 
