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Those of the beryl we sometimes find quite flat, as though they had been compressed by force: then again they are acicular and of extraordinary length, considering their slender diameter. Sometimes their lateral faces are longitudinally striated, and as deeply as the tourmaline, so that the edges of the prism are rendered indistinct.

The phonolite is of a greenish-grey colour, and is full of minute acicular crystals of feldspar; in most parts it has a conchoidal fracture, and is sonorous, yet it is crenulated with minute air-cavities. In a S.W. direction from Lot, there are some other remarkable columnar pinnacles, but of a less regular shape, namely, Lot's Wife, and the Asses' Ears, composed of allied kinds of rock.

It can readily be recognised by its acicular, needle-like leaves, and more particularly by its peculiarly shaped seed vessel, which resembles the pattern on an old-fashioned Indian shawl.

Gilman's feelings, which are evidently sensitive on the subject of this irresponsible contrivance, I remained the prescribed time within the shed, and then managed to limp a little less, and go with him to what are called the Sulphur Banks, on which sulphurous vapour is perpetually depositing the most exquisite acicular sulphur crystals; these, as they aggregate, take entrancing forms, like the featherwork produced by the "frost-fall" in Colorado, but, like it, they perish with a touch, and can only be seen in the wonderful laboratory where they are formed.

Youth forced age slowly backward in the struggle, which at times took on spurts so furious that the slender blades, becoming mere glints of acicular steel, split the moonlight back and forth, up and down, so that their meetings, following one another in a well-nigh continuous stroke, sent a jarring noise through the air.

The acicular leaves of firs, pines, and coniferæ in general, are composed of a bundle, or fasciculus, as a botanist would say, of extremely fine and tenacious fibres, which are surrounded and held together by thin pellicles of a resinous substance.

The fragments are angular or rounded, small or large, and consist of bluish or reddish compact feldspathic matter, in which a few acicular crystals of feldspar can sometimes be seen. The fragments often blend at their edges into the surrounding granular mass, and seem due to a kind of concretionary action.

If further examination shall establish our result, we have in the form of grayish-white acicular crystals a substance which stands to cannabis in nearly the same proportional relation of potency as niorphia to opium, and this most powerful remedy can be given as easily and certainly as any in the pharmacopoeia. If we are successful we shall ere long present it to the medical profession.

These brown-coloured, compact lavas, consist almost entirely of small glimmering scales, or of minute acicular crystals, of feldspar, placed close by the side of each other, and abounding with minute black specks, apparently of hornblende.

The obelisk is from another of Nature's patterns; it is only a gigantic acicular crystal. The Egyptians knew what a monument should be, simple, noble, durable. It seems to me that we Americans might take a lesson from those early architects. Our cemeteries are crowded with monuments which are very far from simple, anything but noble, and stand a small chance of being permanent.