70 
Bog Butter {Butyrellite), from Co. Galway, Ireland." 
Mr. John Plant, F.G.S., exhibited a piece of a mineral 
resin familiarly known in the west of Ireland as Bog Butter. 
The lump weighed exactly I4oz. It came from a good depth 
in a bog in County Galway. A few years ago, when in that 
part of Ireland, he had been unsuccessful in meeting with a 
sample of this curious substance, although he was informed 
that it was not unfrequently met with by the turfcutters 
during each summer. He heard of its origin and of some of 
the uses to which it was said to be put by the poor people 
if they got any of it, from a farmer at Killkee, but he could 
hardly credit the statement that in hard times it was 
melted down and actually used as a dripping to the pota- 
toes; he rather concluded that the greasing was limited to 
the axles of the potatoe cart. The Irish have a widespread 
belief that bog butter was hidden by the fairies [in the bogs 
long ages ago ; and it is affirmed that the butter is some- 
times found in small wooden kegs in bogs along the coast 
These kegs they say have been hastily buried by smugglers 
running a cargo of contraband, though when bog butter was 
declared an illegal article of trade in Ireland they are unable 
to say. Unfortunately, Mr. Plant was not shown a keg, or 
even the staver of a keg, but he was informed that speci- 
mens of veritable kegs of bog butter are to be seen in the 
Museum of the Royal Irish Academy and in the museums 
at Edinburgh. The fairy origin of the bog butter he thought 
mio[ht be ascribed to the active imagination of the Celtic 
brain, many of the inexplicable things in nature being 
readily put down to the good or evil doings of the indigenous 
fairies of Erin. 
By the aid of scientific analysis the substance called bog 
butter can be shown to be a perfectly natural production 
arising from the decomposition of the vegetable matters 
forming the peat or bog, and to belong to the numerous 
family of mineral resins, or hydrocarbon compounds, of 
which Dana describes the composition of seventy species.* 
* Dana, System of Mineralogy 5th edit., 1875, pp. 720 — 760. 
