workers in metals know so well how to produce in limitless profusion for the ruin of the scientific amateur."
If such statements should be made, they will be based upon facts.
There are, however, other facts which no biographer will dare to tell, and which, therefore, I must write for myself. The following experience is one of them. Whether to my credit or to my discredit, I shall tell the plain story and leave it, with all its improbability, to your fair judgment.
Already knowing my taste for the use of the microscope, you can understand the following letter without further introduction:
Dear Philip: I suppose the thermometers in the city are the only scientific instruments now studied with any interest. Being cool enough here to be reasonably unselfish, I am willing to divert your mind from the thermometer to the microscope.
I inclose what seems to my prosaic mind a pebble. It was picked up on the beach and playfully thrown by me at our "Professor." He, of course accidentally, caught it. After an examination, he declared that it differed from anything he had ever seen: that it was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral. In short, he knows that he does n't know what it is, and therefore says (speaking in true scientific vein) "Although of indeterminate nature, certain fusiform bosses, in conjunction with a general spheroidal tendency, seem strong a priori indications of aërolitic flight through our own atmosphere, or other gaseous medium of similar density"! I make no comments. So bring out your microscope and let, us know what it is. If you should come and join us you would find little but sand and salt-water; but then there is plenty of each.
He inclosed a small rounded object wrapped in tissue-paper. It was light blue in color and a trifle smaller than a hazel-nut. The surface seemed, as the Professor hinted, to have been somewhat melted. It certainly had claims to be considered a curiosity.
That evening, after dinner, I took out my microscope, and after carefully cleaning the pebble, I examined the surface under a strong
