Scarcely in any case has the meteoric origin of any iron been more doubtful than that of the Greenland masses found by Professor Nordenskjòld in 1870, for although they contain about 2 per cent. of nickel, and, when etched, show the Widmanstätt’s figures, the fact that iron is imbedded in the basalt, on which the so-called meteorites were lying, bespeaks that the loose masses of iron originally belonged to the basalt.

“The Blue Rocks” (Danish, Blaafjeld, Greenland, Ovifak), on the southern coast of Disko, where the iron was found, are about 1800 feet high; the foot up to 600 or 700 feet is covered by loose stones forming a slant of 30 or 40° above which, in the almost perpendicular rock, 13 or 14 horizontal seams of trap are seen.

Through the kindness of Prof. and Mr. John Young, F.G.S., I have been enabled to examine a number of unclassed minerals belonging to the Hunterian Collection in the Museum of the University of Glasgow. Among them I have found some whose composition differs from anything already described, and it is with the hope that mineralogists may be enabled to identify them elsewhere, that I now publish a detailed account of them. I am sorry that it is impossible for me to state the localities of some of the minerals, owing to the fact that they were unnumbered and unknown specimens, which were found in olcl drawers of the museum when the collection was being removed to the new buildings, but as the minerals with which they are associated are characteristic, we may obtain some clue to the deposits in which they originally lay. I shall describe the minerals in the order of their complexity, giving the least complex the first place.

In a recently exposed part of a quarry at Bowling, on the Clyde, my friend Mr. John Young, F.G.S., noticed a vein from an inch and half to half an inch in thickness, of a deep green mineral having the hardness and peculiar feeling of stealite, and having secured a good sample he forwarded it to me for analysis. It occurs filling a clean sided fisure on the north side of the quarry. The rock is described by Mr. Samuel Allport, F.G.S., as follows :-

“At Bowling, on the North bank of the Clyde, three miles east of Dumbarton, the rock forming the “Hill of Dun,” is a coarse crystalline dolerite, varying in colour from brownish black to black, with distinct crystals of augite, olivine, and felspar diseminated through it. This porphyritic structure is well seen in thin sections. The base is rather finely crystalline and consists of small crystals or grains of the above mentioned constituents, together with numerous grains of magnetite. The large crystals of plagioclase are clear and beautifully striated, they frequently contain glass cavities, and here and there portions, of the base have been enclosed in them . . . . This rock affords excellent examples of serpentinous pseudomorphs after olivine in various stages of formation; the crystalline forms are unusually perfect, and the gradual encroachmeut of the serpentinous matter on the clear olivine may be very well seen. In one of the sections—microscopic—an old fracture has been filled with serpentine, thus forming a vein which traverses some of the large felspar crystals and the surrounding base. A few cavities are also filled with the same substance.”

“Plants live, and grow ; Animals live, grow, and move; Minerals, neither live, grow, nor move.”

For so long a time, has this been an article of almost universal belief, that any nonconformity therewith, is looked upon with more or less of grave suspicion.

In what follows, it is proposed to show that there is a rather more natural order in which the aphorism may appropriately run; namely :—

Minerals grow, Plants live and grow, Animals live, grow, and move at will. “The three kingdoms of nature,” as they are not at all inconveniently called, exist in close relationship; so very close, indeed, that some naturalists think they are not really apart from each other.