on certain stony and metalline Substances , &c. 203 
be wholly iron, but a mixture of nickel and iron. The Trustees 
of the British Museum, who are in possession of some fragments 
of this mass, sent to the Royal Society by Don Rubin de Celis, 
have done me the honour to permit me to examine them ; and 
I have great satisfaction in agreeing with a chemist so justly 
celebrated as Mr. Proust. 
The connexion which naturally exists between one mass of 
native iron and another, immediately turns our attention to 
the native iron in Siberia, described by Pallas; and this, 
we are told, the Tartars considered as a sacred relic, which 
had dropped from heaven. The nickel found in the one mass, 
and the traditional history of the other, not to compare the 
globular bodies of the stone from Benares with the globular 
concavities and the earthy matter of the Siberian iron, tend to 
the formation of a chain between fallen stones and all kinds 
of native iron. How far any real affinity exists between these 
several substances, very obliging friends have afforded me an 
opportunity to form some judgment. I am indebted to Mr. 
Greville and Mr. Hatchett for portions of almost every 
known native iron : and the Count de Bournon has done me 
the favour particularly to describe them as follows. 
Description of various Kinds of native Iron. By the Count de 
Bournon. 
The great number of particles of iron, in. a perfectly metallic 
&tate, contained in the stone from Bohemia, and the said par- 
ticles being so near each other, naturally lead to some re- 
flections respecting the existence of native iron, which, by 
many mineralogists, is still considered as problematical. Let 
us suppose for a moment, that these particles of iron were to 
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