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improved country: I say, whether we take in at one view all this enchanting scenery, or stop to admire the particular beauties of the seat itself, we shall find sufficient matter for pleasure and admiration.The natural appearance of this place, before it was adorned by any improvement, was that of a luxuriant garden, where a great variety of trees and shrubs, the produce only of a more favourable clime, flourished spontaneously, as the arbutus, juniper, yew, buckthorn, service, and others, found growing among the crevices of marble rocks; the seeds, and original plantation of which I suspect to have been laid here many centuries ago, by the monks of the adjacent abbeys; where, meeting with a soil and climate favourable to their preservation and propagation, they have wonderfully flourished ever since, without any assistance from art.

These natural gardens, therefore, wanted little assistance to beautify them, except an inclosure towards the land, and the lopping away part of their luxuriance, to form avenues and walks through them, besides the addition of such exotics as have been but of late years introduced into Irelandamong which there have been plant. ed a considerable number of vines, which are now spreading their branches, and crawling up several sloping rocks of variegated marble. It was, indeed, an handsome compliment which was paid to this place, by a late Right Rev. Prelate, whose high taste in the beauties of art and nature, as well as goodness of heart, and solid learning, all the world equally ad

mired and acknowledged; who being asked what he thought of this seat, immediately answered, that the French Monarch might possibly be able to erect another Versailles, but could not with all his revenues lay out another Mucruss.

The gardens of this seat extend to the ruins of an ancient friery, called Irrelagh, i. e. on the lough, founded by Donald, son of Thady Mac Carty, in the year 1440, for Minorites, or conventual Fran ciscans, and repaired by him in 1468, the year of his death. It was again re-edified in the year 1602, but soon after suffered to' go to ruin. The walks are surrounded by a venerable grove of ash-trees, which are very tall, and in some places grow spontaneously, from the ruins of the abbey. The choir, nave, and steeple, still remain entire, in which are several decayed tombs. The cloisters are likewise entire, in which are several gothic arches of solid marble, which inclose a small square, in the centre of which stands one of the tallest yew-trees I have ever seen; its spreading branches, like a great umbrella, overshadow the niches of the whole cloyster, forming a more solemn and awful kind of covering to it than originally belonged to the place. The steeple was small, and capable of containing only a single bell; and it is supported by a gothic arch or vault. The bell was, not many years ago, found in the adjacent lough, and by the inscription, was known to have belonged to this priory, which, from the time of its foundation, hath been the ce metery of the M'Carty Mores,

* Dr. Berkley, the late Bishop of Cloyne.

and

and other families. Upon the dissolution of religious houses, the revenues and scite of this abbey were granted to captain Robert Collam, who assigned them to bishop Crosbie.

The town of Killarney is a small thriving place, being considerably improved since the minority of its present owner, the Lord Viscount Kenmare, who hath encouraged several inhabitants to settle in it, and hath erected some houses for linen manufacturers, about a mile from the town. There are already four new roads finished to this town, one from the county of Cork, which leads to that city; a second from Castle-Island, which proceeds towards Limerick; the third is that to the river of Kenmare before. mentioned; and a fourth is lately made to Castlemain; from which last place new roads have been car. ried to Tralee and Dingle. The neighbourhood of the mines affords employment for several people, and will consequently cause a con.. siderable sum of money to be spent in it. A new street, with a large commodious inn, are designed to be built here; for the curiosities of the neighbouring lake have of late drawn great numbers of curious travellers to visit it, and, no doubt, many more will go thither to par. take of the diversions and amusements of that place, when they can be assured of being commodiously and cheaply entertained.

The principal ornament of Killarney is the seat and gardens of Lord Kenmare, planted with large nurseries of fruit and timber trees. His lordship purposes to enlarge a canal which runs through his dens, and to make it communicate with the lake, which will not only render them more beautiful, but

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will also add to the convenience of water-carriage to and from the lake. Not far from the house is a large and pleasant park, well wooded, and stocked with deer, which he hath also in plenty in the forests of the adjacent mountains.

The natural history of Hartz Forest, in His Majesty's German dominions. Written in German by H. Ebrens, M.D.

Of the cavern at Scharzfeld.

THE
HE cavern at Scharzfeld is

well worth seeing, being caves remarkable for several rarities; the country people call it the Dwarf. holes. It is situated in the Lower Hartz, in the county of Hohnstein, in a wood not far from the castle of Scharzfeld. Whoever wants to see this cavern, goes to the village of Scharzfeld to look out for a guide. Then you proceed through a wood and a thicket, and coming near the cavern, you must get down by the knots and branches of a large tree with some trouble and danger, to come to the mouth of it. When you are on the ground, there appears to your view a large cleft in a rock, about fourteen feet high: the inside of it is lined all about with a thick and shining drop-stone. Now you advance a pretty way forwards, and must creep a considerable length, till you come into the second cave, which for height and bigness is not inferior to the first. From thence you creep again with some trouble into the third, and from thence to the fourth cave, and so on; and in this manner, some guides say, one may go five or six English miles under ground, without coming to the end.

The

The cold is very intense in this cavern, and rather greater than in the Baumans cave. To let in some light, there are several round and square holes in the roof, some of which are stopped up with stones and other rubbish. The common people imagine the dwarfs went in and out of these openings, but it is more probable they were made for air-holes. There are such num. bers of passages and turnings, that it is almost impossible to count them; some running forwards, some sideways, and others across, all communicating with one another in the manner of a labyrinth, for which reason it is very difficult to find one's way out of it again without a guide. Most of these passages are as clean as if they were swept with a broom, and some are filled up with rubbish by those that dug there, either for ore, or the fossile #nicorn.

The Drop-stone is found in sevefal of these caves, although the top of the mountain where the cavern is, be a dry lime-stone. The water drops continually from the roof, so thick, that it seems as if it rain ed; and when these drops fall on your clothes, and grow dry upon them, they turn to white spots, and a white powder like chalk comes from it.

It is reported, that once, on the eve of St. Peter and Paul, twenty-five persons bound themselves by oath to each other, to go into this cavern, and not to come out of it again till they had viewed all the curiosities therein, and found out the end; therefore they provided themselves with a number of candles, a ladder, and strings, and provision for several days.

When they were advanced about nine hundred fathoms, they found many curiosities, large places like palaces, all sorts of figures formed by the Drop-stone; also some springs, running-waters, quantities of hu. man bones, some of a gigantic size. Then creeping again through other narrow passages, they came into spacious places, where twenty-five could walk a-breast. Thus they went on till they could go no far. ther: by following the thread which they had tied to the entry of the cavern, they found their way back again without difficulty; but by the coldness of the place, and many frights, they were become so pale, and their countenances so al. tered, that their friends hardly knew them again.

Here is also found the fossile unicorn, but not near in such quantity as formerly, because the peasants, who used to dig for it, and to sell it to the apothecaries and druggists, have almost exhausted the place. This fossile is of dif. ferent shapes; sometimes 'tis form. ed like a straight horn, a scull, a jaw-bone, a shoulder-blade, and a back-bone, a rib, a tooth, a thighbone, and all other sorts of bones both of men and beasts; and there is some found like an unshapen lump or mass of stone, having no resem. blance to any bone at all.

There have been great disputes among the learned about this fossile: some, considering that there are pieces so exactly like true bones, affirm they must really have been part of some animal; and, that those of an anomalous form are of the mineral kind. But others reply, that upon examination they cannot find that great likeness to bones as their adversaries are pleased

to

to fancy in particular they say, that those bones of the fossile unicorn, which are called the jaw bone, have such apophyses as are never to be met with in the natural way; and that some being like no bone at all, they scruple not to conclude the whole to be a lusus nature, or an accidental produce of nature. Moreover, they add, that granting some to be like true bones, it cannot be inferred from thence that they were really so; because else it would follow, that the figures represented in some pieces of slate, and the Cornua Ammonis, were once real; which are now allowed on all hands to be stones of a particular kind.

Conringius, in his dissertation De antiqua Helmiadist statu, thinks the fossile unicorn were petrified bones. And Otto de Querick, in his Experimenta Magdeburgica, maintains the same opinion. That there had been such animals as unicorns, he pretends to corroborate by the following fact: he says, that anno 1663, in a lime-pit near Quedlinburg, there was found an entire skeleton of an unicorn, which had fixed to its forehead a long bone, or horn, as thick as a man's thighbone, and was presented to the abbess of Quedlinburg; and, that these bones had been conveyed to this place in the general flood, is proved sufficiently by the various bones dug up in most parts of the world. The Theatrum Europæum, part V. mentions, that anno 1645 the Swedes dug up, near Crems, in Austria, a giant's skeleton, whose head was as big as a middle-sized table, and one tooth weighed five pounds and a half, and the bone of his arm as big as a man's middle. Eckstormius also confirms it, with the author of the Topographia

of Brunswick, that one time there was found in the Baumans cave an human scull of a gigantic

size.

But the bigness of some of these bones, seems to argue that they could not be human, and therefore 'tis probable they either have increased under ground, or else are a lusus naturæ: for the tallest man we know of, was Og of Başan, whose bed is said, in Deuteronomy, chap. iii. to have been eighteen feet long: now, allowing the bed to be but one foot longer than the man, he was seventeen feet high. But if the head and tooth found by the Swedes had belonged to a regularly-proportioned man, he must have exceeded Og by a vast deal; for the tooth is said to have weighed five pounds and a half, and supposing that of a common man to weigh half an ounce, which is too much, then the giant must have had a height answerable to 176 times the bulk of a middle. sized man.

Others cannot comprehend how these supposed bones should have been brought together in such quan tities into these caverns; nor will they be satisfied with the reasons. some naturalists give for their manner of petrifaction; wherefore Sen-. nertus, in his Epitome Scientia naturalis, lib. v. cap. 4. Schræder, in his Pharmacopeia medica, and Laurentius Bauschius, in his Schedi amsa Curiosum de Unicornu fossili, and others, count it among the minerals.

Kircher, in his Mundus subier raneus, lib. viii. c. 8. makes this distinction betwixt bones of a mineral produce, and petrified ones; he says, the first are solid throughout, but the latter hollow. Which observation I have found not to be

infallible, having seen some bones of the mineral kind that were concave, as if they had formerly contained marrow.

Thus has this controversy been canvassed pro and con; but as I have had the opportunity of examining great quantities of this fossil, particularly in my father's cabinet, who had various pieces of it, I have found most of that dug about the Hartz to be of a mineral kind.

This being taken for granted, we are next to consider the matter it is composed of. Some think with Libavius, Part 3. Singular. 1. 18. c. 17. that it is a bituminous earth; and others say it is a kind of agate petrified; but to me it seems most probable that it is made of a clay, or fattish earth, called in Latin marga, or marl, which is very plentiful in this country, and serves to manure the ground, instead of dung. According to the figure this earth lies in underground, when the petrifying water comes to it, and causes it to grow hard, so it remains, and thus becomes sometimes a well-shapen bone, and often a lump of matter of no distinct form at all. This formation is not perfected at once; for it is observed, that some pieces lying in a place where there is room for increase, will grow to a mon

strous size.

This fossil hath several names, viz. unicornu minerale, ebur fossile, osteites, monoceros vulgi, litho marga alba, &c. The most common term it is known by, is unicornu fossile; but I can see no rea son why it should rather be called unicorn than any other animal, since it is found of all sorts of forms, and those pieces resembling the horn of an unicorn but very rarely to be met with.

It is most commonly of a light grey, black, or yellowish colour, and very seldom perfectly white: sometimes it is as hard as a stone, and other times soft like clay, and grows harder the longer it is exposed to the air. It has commonly neither smell nor taste, yet sometimes I have found it with a scent like that of quinces; which probably might proceed from a bitu. minous substance mixed with the petrifying water. It is introduced in the Materia Medica; and the whitest and mellowest is reckoned the best for that purpose. The common people try it by putting it into cold water; and that which causes most bubbles to rise, they count for the best sort. The reason of the rising of these bubbles is, because as this fossil is full of pores, wherein air is contained, the water getting into them, drives out the air, which being specifically lighter than the water, rises in the form of those bubbles to the surface.

The common people looked for. merly upon it as a medicine of extraordinary efficacy, thinking it to be the true unicorn; but since it is come to be common, it hath lost much of its repute. It operates very like the terra sigillata, absorbs, adstringes, and promotes perspiration (vide Francisc. Joel. Pract. tom. 5.), and is one of the ingredients of the Bezoardic powder described by D. Ludovici in Pharmacopoeia moderno sæculo appli canda, and produces a very good effect, unless a symptomatic costiveness forbid its use. Externally it serves in pustulary eruptions and erosions about the pudendum and fundament in children, and in eyewaters. Lastly, D. Hoffman, in his Clavis Schraderiana, admo.

nishes

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