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From time to time carbonate of ammonia is added to the bath, as it is said to throw up "dirt." The stuff or "dirt," chiefly an ochre-like mass stained black with the dye, and rich in iron and carbonate of iron, is skimmed off, and fresh verdigris and copperas added with another lot of hat-forms.
No doubt on adding fresh copperas further precipitation of iron will take place, and so this ochre-like precipitate will accumulate, and will eventually come upon the hats like a kind of thin black mud.
Lessing, presumably in his Laocoon, has attributed this to the effects of sheer panic; but Carver's explanation, which attributes the ochre-like tint to the hypodermic operation of the Mash-Glance, seems far more plausible. For myself I abstain from casting the weight of my support in either scale, because my particular province is speculative philosophy and not comparative dermatology.
The conclusion here arrived at was still further verified by another sirocco-storm in May 1846, which extended to Genoa, and bore with it a dust that 'covered the roofs of the city in great abundance. This, as was clearly ascertained, contained formations identical with those which had been collected off the Cape de Verd; and it was shewn that the dust-showers of the Atlantic, and those of Malta and Genoa, were 'always of a yellow ochre-like colour not gray, like those of the kamsin, in North Africa. The peculiar colour of the dust was found to be caused by iron-oxide; and from one-sixth to one-third of the whole proved to consist 'of determinable organic parts. In the following year, 1847, Ehrenberg had another opportunity of testing his conclusions, in specimens of dust which had fallen in Italy and Sicily in 1802 and 1813; the same result came out on examination; 'several species peculiar to South America, and none peculiar to Africa.
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