Page:Philosophical Transactions - Volume 005.djvu/11

 which grows in Nova-Scotia, and (as I hear) in the more Easterly parts of N. England. Upon this bark there are little knobs, within which there is a liquid matter like Turpentine (which will run out, the knob being cut open) of a very sanative nature, as I am informed by those, who affirm, that they have often tryed it.

In the same Box are Pods of a Vegetable, we call silk-grass, which are full of a kind of most fine down-like Cotton-wool, many such flocks in one and the same pod ending in a flat Seed. 'Tis used to stuff up Pillows and Cushions; being tryed to spin, it proves not strong enough. The Seeds 'tis like may grow with you, if set in some Garden; whereby the whole Plant may be seen.

You'l find also a Branch of the Tree, call'd the Cotton-tree, bearing a kind of Down which also is not Ht to spin. The Trees grow high and big. At the bottom of some of the Leaves, next to the stalk of them, is a knob, which is hollow, and a certain fly, some-what like a pis-mire-fly, is bred therein.

More-over, there are some of the Matrices, in which those Shels are bred, of which the Indians make the white Wampanpeage, one sort of their mony. They grow on the bottom of Sea-bays, and the shels are like Periwinkles, but greater. Whilst they are very smal, and first growing, many of them are within one of the concave receptacles of these Matrices, which reare [sic] very tough, and strong, so contrived, that they are separate from one another, yet so, that each of them is fastned to a kind of skin, subtended all along to all these cases or baggs.

There is, besides, in a large round Box, a strange kind of Fish, which was taken by a Fisherman, when he was fishing for Codfish in that Sea, which is without Massachuset Bay in N. England. It was living, when it was taken, which was done, I think, by an hook. The name of it I know not, nor can I write more particularly of it, because I could not yet speak with the Fisherman, who broughbrought [sic] it from Sea. I have not seen the like. The Mouth is in the middle; and they say, that all the Arms, you see round about, were in motion, when it was first taken.

We omit the other particulars here, that we may reflect a little upon this elaborate piece of Nature, the Fish, which,