Notices of Memoirs — Remarkable JlaUstones. '21 



I. — On some Eemarkablb Forms of Hailstones Eecently 

 Observed in Georgia. 



[Extract from a letter from Staatsrath Abich to Chevalier W. von Ilaidinger. 

 From the Journal of the Austrian Meteorological Society, vol. iv., p. 417.] 



I take this opportunity of giving you a preliminary notice of two 

 hailstorms, of Ijoth of which I was fortunate enough to be a witness. 

 The phenomena were of so unusual a character that they are well 

 worthy of a full and precise account. 



They took place within fourteen days of each other, the first on the 

 27th May last, at 3 p.m., the second on the 9th June, at 6 p.m. The 

 localities were not far asunder, being both in the neighbourhood of 

 Tiflis, near Beloi Kliutsch. The morphological characters of the 

 hailstones, which were very large, as much as sixty or' seventy 

 millimetres in diameter, were as remarkable as they were dissimilar. 

 On the first occasion they were oblate spheroids, resembling Man- 

 darin oranges, while their structure seemed almost organic. On the 

 second there was a fall of actual ice crystals, an occurrence which 

 has never before been noticed, at least, as far as I could discover 

 from the literature within my reach. The stones were not mere 

 lumps, exhibiting indistinct crystalline forms, but spheroidal bodies 

 of definite crystalline structure, overgrown along the plane of the 

 major axis by a series of clear crystals exhibiting various combinations 

 belonging to the hexagonal system. The commonest forms were 

 those which occur in calcite and specular iron. Of the former type, 

 by far the most abundant were combinations of the scalenohedron, 

 with rhombohedral faces ; crystals of fifteen to twenty millimetres 

 in height, and corresponding thickness, prettily grouped with com- 

 binations of the prism and obtuse rhombohedra. The terminal plane 

 was also occasionally noticeable. Some which fell at the beginning 

 of the storm were flat, tabular, crystalline masses, thirty to forty 

 millimetres in diameter, resembling the so-called "eisen-rose," which 

 occurs at St. Grotthardt. 



The stones, when picked up quite fresh, showed sharp edges, with 

 faces which were for the most part slightly curved like those of 

 diamond ; however, those which I took to belong to the scaleno- 

 hedron were perfectly plane. 



I was in the open air when each of the storms began, and was 

 able to gain shelter before I received any injury. This was fortunate, 

 for the damage done, even to large trees, was very serious. 



I reached home in a quarter of an hour, and found a pail full of 

 the largest stones, which had been collected as soon as the first 

 fright had passed over. My house was not much damaged. I sat 

 down at once and drew ten of these remarkable forms, which had 

 scarcely undergone any alteration. 



I have often thought over our conversations about hail, and I see 

 that if I now applied all the theories which have ever been broached 

 to the facts which have come under my own notice, not a single one 

 of them will give me any light towards their explanation. I would 

 ask how such a regular growth of crystalline masses, reminding us 



