m 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[August 17, 1872 
converted into them by an additional amount of pepsin. 
The amount of peptones formed at the expense of para- 
peptones increases with the amount of pepsin present. 
Digestion is arrested by accumulation of products of 
digestion, and especially of peptones in the digestive 
fluid. It is impeded by the presence of 4-3 per cent, of 
peptones, and probably stopped by 6 or 8-6 per cent. 
Dilute acid alone will convert fibrin into peptone, 
even at ordinary temperatures, but much more slowly 
than w T hen pepsin is present. 
Fibrin soaked in dilute hydrochloric acid till it formed 
a stiff jelly, and placed in an air bath at 30°-40° C., be¬ 
came fluid in 24 hours, and contained 1 per cent, of 
peptone .—Journal of the Chemical Society. 
THE BOTANY OF ‘ LOTHAIR.’ 
A remark^ in ‘ Lothair’ “that all head gardeners are 
opinionated” appears to have aroused the wrath of one 
of.the readers of the Gardeners' Chronicle , and upon the 
principle that one good turn deserves another, he criti¬ 
cizes some of Mr. Disraeli’s references to plants in that 
celebrated book, and suggests that the talented author 
should be a little less inexact when he writes on botani¬ 
cal subjects. He commences with a description of 
Belmont:—“ ‘ The last saloon led into a room of smaller 
dimensions opening on the garden, and which Lothair 
at first thought must be a fernery, it seemed so full of 
choice and expanding specimens of that beautiful and 
multiform plant,’ and says, “ I would recommend the 
perusal of this paragraph to those interested in the origin 
of species, tor it clearly assumes that all the species of 
ferns that go to make up a fernery are multiforms of 
one plant. T he talented author no doubt did not mean 
it to be in that sense, but he has said it; and those who 
know ferns from the tiny filmy fern of Tunbridge 
Wells (Hymenophyllum tunbridgense), which, when 
grown to perfection, attains only the height of a bronze 
penny piece, and weighs when dried about a drachm, to 
the tree-ferns of Australia, which look so like palm- 
tiees that one has to come near before the difference is 
seen well know that these and a legion of others are 
verily ot the fern family, certainly not multiforms of 
the same plant. The author is very chary of botani¬ 
c‘s • "M ie on ty one I remember to have seen in 
othair . is fetephanotus [Stephanotis]—he only gives 
the generic and not the specific name; and although 
a proper name, and entitled to a capital letter, it is 
wiitten stcphanotus. Now, if London or Athens were 
written lonclon, athens, few readers would recognize the 
capitals of the two kingdoms. Our greatest authors of 
romance—Disraeli, Dickens, Scott—have all treated 
horticultural subjects lightly; and the mere labourer 
unlettered 13 held up as a gardener. Disraeli’s 
Hawkins, a nobleman s head gardener, is represented 
as disobedient to his employer, a dogged hanger on, 
that only kept Ins situation by the chaplain’s advice 
and assistance; but it I ather Colman is no better in¬ 
formed than the author of ‘ Lothair ’ on the subject of 
the fern family I fear that ‘ Hawkins ’ will not get rich 
by prizes for his skill in cultivating that multiform 
tribe of plants. At p. 63 there is a struggle to de¬ 
scribe a pmetum-a plantation of spruce firs, but 
planted wide apart, every tree perfect, huge, and com¬ 
plete, lull of massy grace; wondrous groups of juniper, 
green and spiral does any one know a spiral juniper ? 
‘I he cypress and her spire,’ we read of in the poets ; 
t oes oui author mean spire when he writes spiral for 
a flame-shaped bush? And the whole of Abies and 
Bicea would pass for spruce firs to many observers— 
‘ A spruce fir by the river’s brim 
Was just a spruce fir unto him 
And nothing more.’ ” 
METEORIC STONES.* 
BY NEVIL STORY-MASKELYNE, ESQ., M.A., F.R.S.. 
The substantial unity of the celestial objects dis¬ 
tinguished in common language by the names shooting 
or falling stars, fire-balls, and meteorites, and further 
the coincidence in many important respects of these with 
comets, and possibly with the zodiacal light, were sug¬ 
gestions made by Humboldt in the ‘ Cosmos,’ which 
have received much confirmation from the subsequent 
advance of science. 
The greater apparent velocity with which the ordinary 
meteors traverse the atmosphere as compared with that 
with which the less frequent larger bodies are seen to 
move, the marked periodicity that attends the recur¬ 
rence of the former in several, and espcially in two, 
notable cases of meteor-showers, offer an apparent con¬ 
trast between these classes of meteors; it is not, how¬ 
ever, in all probability, a real contrast, for the one 
class passes into the other by every gradation in 
the magnitude of the mass or "masses of which the 
meteor consists, and consequently in the grandeur 
of the phenomena which accompany its advent. If 
of the material composing the ordinary falling star 
we have never yet been able to recognize any ves¬ 
tiges as reaching the earth; of the meteorite, on the other 
hand, the mineral collections of Europe contain nume¬ 
rous carefully collected specimens, which are the frag¬ 
ments that have escaped the fiery ordeal of the transit 
through our earth’s atmosphere, and in these we recog¬ 
nize masses composed either of iron (siderites), or of stone 
(aerolites), or of a mixture of the two (siderolites). The 
phenomena associated with such falls of meteoric matter 
have been described in very similar language by those 
who have witnessed them in various parts of the world, 
and these accounts, whether coming from European ob¬ 
servers or from Hindoo herdsmen (of which some were 
read by the lecturer), concur generally in the approach 
of the meteorite as a fiery mass, emanating from a cloud 
when seen by day, and exploding often with successive 
detonations that are heard over a great extent of coun¬ 
try, even in certain cases at points more than 60 miles 
distant, but finally reaching the earth with a velocity 
little higher than what might be due to the motion of a 
falling body. Externally these meteoric masses are 
generally hot when they fall; sometimes, however, they 
are. not so : the discrepancies in the accounts being ex¬ 
plained by one authenticated case in which the mass was 
internally intensely cold, though at first hot externally. 
The fallen meteorite is invariably coated with an incrus¬ 
tation, sometimes shining as an enamel, generally black, 
but occasionally colourless where the aerolite "is free 
from ferrous silicates; and this incrustation is seen to 
have been formed in the atmosphere, since it is found 
coating surfaces of fragments that have been severed by 
the explosions in the air. 
Aerolites frequently fall simultaneously in large 
numbers, many thousands of them being in such cases 
spread over a surface of the country some miles in ex¬ 
tent ; and such showers of stones seem to have entered 
the atmosphere as a group, though their numbers must 
subsequently have been greatly increased by the divi¬ 
sion accompanying their detonation. 
The explanation of the incrustation and of the cloud 
left by the meteorite, or out of which it seems to emerge, 
is found in the transformation into heat of the energy- 
actuating. a body that enters our atmosphere with a 
motion of 12 to 40 miles in a second. The velocity of 
the body is almost instantaneously arrested by the at¬ 
mospheric resistance, and in a very few seconds the 
mass becomes, comparatively speaking, stationary. Its 
surface must, as a consequence, be immediately fused, 
and the melted matter would be flung off from it into 
the surrounding air, fresh surfaces continually affording 
* A Paper read at the Royal Institution, May, 10th, 1872. 
