186 Scientific Intelligence . — Meteorology. 
a level, I lay down on the ground, and found it to be rather 
lower than the situation I occupied near the summit of the 
mountain. Their bases were, I should suppose, not above three 
or four feet in diameter, which did not increase nor diminish, 
till their junction with the cloud, when they assumed a more 
conical shape, the base of which was in the cloud ; they resem- 
bled immense columns or pillars ; they had no motion forwards 
or backwards ; and, as far as our eyes could ascertain, they had 
no revolving motion upon their own axes. The attraction exist- 
ing between the pillar and the cloud was so great, that, at the 
supervention of a strong breeze, though the centre of the pillar 
yielded, it never deviated from its columnar form, and the top 
remained precisely over the point from which it arose, forming, 
as it were, for the time, a segment of a circle. A short time af- 
ter perceiving this remarkable phenomenon, we had occasion to 
remark the same process taking place on the lake itself. The co- 
lumns, though at a great distance from us, we could plainly per- 
ceive were vapour, and not water ; but they did not take on them- 
selves so uniform an appearance. During this interesting scene, I 
hung two small balls hewn out of the pith of the elder-tree, at 
the end of a stick of gum-lac, a strong insulating substance, and 
more portable than glass ; the repulsion from one another was 
such, as to indicate that the atmosphere was in a high state of 
electricity. Hygrometer I had none ; thermometer stood at 45.°” 
— Mr W. T. Ainsworth. 
3. Largest Mass of European Meteoric Iron . — Colonel 
Gibbs, in the first volume of Bruce’s American Mineralogical 
Journal, mentions, that, in the year 1805, during a mineralogi- 
cal tour through the Ardennes, he found, near Bitburg, a mass 
of iron, about 3400 lb. weight, which, he was told, formerly lay 
on the top of a neighbouring hill, but had been rolled down to 
its present place. He found it nearly pure iron, with a small 
proportion of nickel, and considered it as of meteoric origin. In 
1817, M. Semonis, a mine-officer, examined the mass, and re- 
ported that it was artificial. Chladni, in 1819, arranged it with 
his problematical meteoric irons. In 1821, Chladni published 
an extract from Colonel Gibbs’s account in Gilbert’s Annalen, 
which excited much attention. Nogerrath ascertained, that 
the mass had been disposed of at a small price to an iron-master, 
