68 



SCIENCE, 



[Vol. V., No. 103. 



has a little building to himself, where he is 

 constantly employed in making restorations and 

 casts of novelties, which are distributed with 

 great liberality. 



Only favored visitors go to the basement, or 

 care to go. The public entrance is above, 

 opening underneath a magnificent rose-window 

 into a spacious court with tiled floor, and walls 

 of variegated bricks. This region is garnished 

 by great slabs of the celebrated footprint 

 sandstones from the Connecticut vallev, and a 



tion. This might be expected, considering the 

 men — Dana, Silliman, Brush, and others — 

 of whose labors it is the result. 



To mention half of the notable minerals 

 here, would exhaust the space set apart for the 

 whole of this article. There were formerly sev- 

 eral thousand dollars' worth of diamonds in 

 one of the cases ; but on account of their theft, 

 though they were afterwards recovered, the 

 labels now state that the present specimens 

 are glass facsimiles. The only thing in this 



Fig. 1. — The Peabody museum as it will appear when completed. 



huge stump taken entire from a coal-bed. Iron 

 staircases, clinging to the wall in spiral flight, 

 lead to the top story, and the court is roofed 

 with glass. 



On the right and left of the entrance are 

 doors leading to business offices, the blow-pipe 

 laboratory, and the lecture-rooms of the Pro- 

 fessors Dana (father and son), where large 

 audiences frequently gather to hear the instruc- 

 tion designed for undergraduates alone ; and 

 in the rear of the court, on the ground-floor, is 

 the exhibition hall for minerals, of which the 

 museum possesses an almost unrivalled collec- 



1 The right-hand third is already constructed. 



room not locked up is a meteorite weighing 

 sixteen hundred pounds. The metal in one 

 spot has been sawed off, and polished until it 

 looks like burnished steel, and has been en- 

 graved with an historical inscription, from which 

 it appears that this meteorite fell in Texas, 

 presumably the only state in the Union large 

 enough to receive it safely. In an adjoining 

 case are a peck or so of small meteorites, 

 picked up within a narrow area of Iowa, and 

 of suitable size to be rained down upon a more 

 thickly settled region. 



After the brilliant and many tinted ores, the 

 endless variety and beauty of the quartz crys- 



