pointing outwards. It is generally white, but often coloured by admixture; I have a large specimen, from Spain, of a varying deep red, and silky lustre ; and another, cut and polished, of a striped brown and white from Derbyshire, and there called bacon-stone. There are several species connected with gypsum, as anhydrite, &c., but they are extremely rare. The phosphate of lime, apatite, or moroxite, contains a little fluoric acid, and silica, &c., and is much less common than the foregoing species. Its crystal is sixsided, with the edges bevelled at the ends. I have one small crystal from Norway, of a brownish colour, imbedded in the carbonate of lime; and a larger blue one with augite in long dark prisms. The fluate of lime, fluor spar, or Derbyshire spar, is very common in that county and elsewhere. Its crystal is the plain square cube, and its colours are as varied as those of the rainbow. It is one of the most beautiful of the limes, and when compact, is cut and polished, in the forms of urns, and vases, and all kinds of ornaments. The purple kind is generally preferred for these purposes. I have a large macled crystal, nearly an inch and half square, of a smoky violet hue, embedded, and half veiled in a mass of white carbonate crystals, with several smaller coloured ones near it. It is from Derbyshire, one of the most beautiful things in my possession. Also some wine-coloured yellow ones, nearly the same size, from Cumberland, sprinkled with pyrites,-two or three green specimens, of different sizes, clouded with purple, like the sea in a storm; with some of the polished compact purple and white, in concentric circles. For many of these I am indebted to some dear friends, who have visited Derbyshire and its rich stores of minerals, a pleasure I have never yet enjoyed. We now come to some more rare and little known metals. Lithium is the base of a strong alkali called lithia, which is its oxyde, and was first discovered in the scarce mineral called Petalite; a mixture of silica and alumina, found only at the iron mine of Uton, an island on the Swedish coast. A slight trace of lithia occurs in several different minerals, but it has never been found in any other state. The thirty-fourth metal is Cadmium, which I believe is not found in a mineral form. The thirty-fifth is Zirconium, which is not quite so rare; its oxyde forms an earth which is the chief component of the gems, hyacinth, jargoon, and zirconite. They are sometimes considered as only sub-species of the same gem, and consist of from 66 to 70 parts of zirconia, with silica to the amount of 26 to 31; and in the jargoon, two parts of iron. Hyacinth is of a red or yellow colour, and transparent jargoon comes from Ceylon, is pale and smoky; zirconite is of duller colours, and often opake. They are found in Siberia, Greenland, &c. X. Q. THE FAMILY OF GLENCARRA. A TALE OF FACTS.* BY SIDNEY O'MOORE. THE west of Ireland abounds in scenes of picturesque beauty. Its shores are girdled by lofty crags, bold headlands, innumerable islets and caves hollowed out by the musical waves of the Atlantic; while the inland scenery is rich in wild mountains and lovely lakes, combined in forms of surpassing sublimity. Alas, many of those mountains are worn by the traces of thousands of the votaries of superstition, those crags are ensanguined by drops from their suffering forms, those lakes receive their offerings, and re-echo to their prayers to the 'Queen of heaven.' Not far from one of their holy places of pilgrimage stands Glencarra. The old mansion is nearly embowered in trees, over which on one side frowns a broad dark mountain, down which deep fissures have been worn by winter torrents; on the other, a sunny lawn, of the vivid green so peculiar to the Emerald Isle, slopes from the entrance of the house to the isle-gemmed waters of Lough Conn; while the horizon is closed by ranges of hills or mountains which form, as it were, an * By this expression I would have it understood, that most of the scenes and incidents of the tale are depicted from real life, but the aid of fiction has been enlisted to weave the whole into a connected story. amphitheatre around the lovely lake. The turrets, and even the offices of Glencarra, wear an air of venerable antiquity, for the hand of time has richly clothed them with luxuriant festoons of ivy. In this happy abode glided by my infancy and childhood. I had two brothers and a sister; our parents took much pains to impress upon our minds that we were but travellers through this world, and that we should ever remember, and act with reference to that world which must be our abode throughout eternity. They also taught us to regard each daily blessing, and each new pleasure, as a gift proceeding from a Father of love, and the feeling of grateful love which this reflection produced in our hearts, added zest to our keen enjoyment of life. At length an event occurred which separated us for some months from our beloved parents. My father while in London upon some business of importance, was seized with a malignant fever, and my mother was summoned to attend his couch of sickness. She considered her children too young, either to share the fatigue of her rapid journey, or to risk the danger of contagion. We were therefore left under the care of an old nurse, who had lived many years at Glen carra. About this time the spirit of rebellion, after desolating France, had crossed the seas to infuse its deadly poison into the minds of the Irish peasantry. Scarcely had my mother sailed for England before the country was proclaimed to be in open revolt, and the military were permitted to act without magisterial control. At the end of May, (1798) we heard that civil war was raging violently in the counties surrounding Dublin; but the whole of the province of Connaught still remained in unbroken tranquillity. The coaches ceased to run, and we did not receive any intelligence concerning my parents for many weeks. At length our fears for their safety were checquered by alarm for our own, as the popular ferment extended to our hitherto tranquil and secluded abode. The emissaries of rebellion spread rumours throughout the country, that the Protestants had projected a general massacre of all who differed from them in religious tenets, and that they had sworn not to cease the work of slaughter 'until the rivers should run blood and the unburied dead should occasion a general pestilence.' It was also asserted that they had prepared large black candles of some inflammable and unextinguishable substance, with which they intended to fire the houses of the peasantry. These unfounded reports were circulated in order to promote religious enmity, and were implicitly believed by the ever-credulous populace. Indeed they received some shadow of confirmation from the accounts of many Northern emigrants, who had been obliged to forsake their homes by the intolerant zeal of the Orangemen in Armagh. Numbers of the poor who forgot that the best means to change their countrymen's belief was to enlighten, not to persecute, left their cabins at sunset and passed the night in the sides of ditches, or in any other shelter they could procure, free from the fancied terrors of nocturnal massacre. Glencarra afforded nightly refuge to Nurse Mabel's children and their families. At length, on the 24th of August, it was announced that a body of French troops had landed in Killala. Like a train touched by an electric spark, the flame of rebellion burst forth throughout Connaught, and the peasantry arose en masse to arms. Mabel received the intelligence of French invasion from her grandson, |