568 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
come subjects of conversation at Abbotsford; and on one occasion 
when I happened to mention that singular stones were found in 
the Fairy Dean, Sir Walter Scott expressed a desire to see them, 
and to know how they were formed. I accordingly sent some 
young persons to search for them in the bed of the rivulet, and I 
was fortunate in thus obtaining several specimens of great variety, 
and singular shape, and showing, very clearly, the manner in which 
they were formed. 
It did not then occur to me that a description of these stones 
would excite any other than a local interest ; but, some years 
ago, when in company with our distinguished countryman Mr 
Eobert Brown, the Botanicorum facile Princejps of Humboldt, 
he asked me to accompany him to his museum, to see some 
remarkable mineral productions which had been sent to him, 
and which he had not seen before. These minerals were exactly 
the same as the Fairy Stones from Eoxburghshire, but none of 
them were so remarkable, either in their shape or their mode of 
formation, as those which I now present to the Society. 
The Fairy Stones are generally of a grey colour, like common 
freestone, but some of them are coated to the thickness of about 
the seventieth of an inch, with a black substance, so soft as to pro- 
duce a black streak upon paper like a crayon. 
These stones are generally formed of concentric layers more or 
less regular round a single centre, as in figs. 1 and 2, some of them 
Fig. 1. Fig. 2. 
having the form of a lens, ocasionally so deep, as to be almost a 
sphere. In many specimens the concentric layers are formed 
round two centres, as in fig. 3 ; in some round three centres, and 
in others round many centres, as in figs. 4 and 5, 
