Page:Micrographia - or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon.djvu/154

Rh the other sides as much outwards beyond the limits of a Globe; just as it would happen, if a heap of exactly round Balls of soft Clay were heaped upon one another; or, as I have often seen a heap of small Globules of Quicksilver, reduc'd to that form by rubbing it much in a glaz'd Vessel, with some slimy or sluggish liquor, such as Spittle, when though the top of the upper Globules be very neer spherical, yet those that are prest upon by others, exactly imitate the forms of these lately mention'd grains.

Where these grains touch each other, they are so firmly united or settled together, that they seldom part without breaking a hole in one or th'other of them, such as a, a, a, b, c, c, &c. Some of which fractions, as a, a, a, a, where the touch has been but light, break no more then the outward crust, or first shell of the stone, which is of a white colour, a little dash'd with a brownish Yellow, and is very thin, like the shell of an Egg: and I have seen some of those grains perfectly resemble some kind of Eggs, both in colour and shape: But where the union of the contiguous granules has been more firm, there the divulsion has made a greater Chasm, as at b, b, b, in so much that I have observ'd some of them quite broken in two, as at c, c, c, which has discovered to me a further resemblance they have to Eggs, they having an appearance of a white and yelk, by two differing substances that envelope and encompass each other.

That which we may call the white was pretty whitish neer the yelk, but more duskie towards the shell; some of them I could plainly perceive to be shot or radiated like a Pyrites or fire-stone; the yelk in some I saw hollow, in others fill'd with a duskie brown and porous substance like a kind of pith.

The small pores, or interstitia e e e e betwixt the Globules, I plainly saw, and found by other trials to be every way pervious to air and water, for I could blow through a piece of this stone of a considerable thickness, as easily as I have blown through a Cane, which minded me of the pores which Des Cartes allow his materia subtilis between the æthereal globules.

The object, through the Microscope, appears like a Congeries or heap of Pibbles, such as I have often seen cast up on the shore, by the working of the Sea after a great storm, or like (in shape, though not colour) a company of small Globules of Quicksilver, look'd on with a Microscope, when reduc'd into that form by the way lately mentioned. And perhaps, this last may give some hint at the manner of the formation of the former: For supposing some Lapidescent substance to be generated, or some way brought (either by some commixture of bodies in the Sea it self, or protruded in, perhaps, out of some subterraneous caverns) to the bottom of the Sea, and there remaining in the form of a liquor like Quicksilver, heterogeneous to the ambient Saline fluid, it may by the working and tumblings of the Sea to and fro be jumbled and comminuted into such Globules as may afterwards be hardned into Flints, the lying of which one upon another, when in the Sea, being not very hard, by reason of the weight of the incompassing fluid, may cause the undermost to be a little, though not much, varied from a globular Figure. But this only by the by. Rh