"It is excessively warm, don't you think so?" said the minister.
"It is," said I, "but I think we are going to have a storm soon; I see it is getting quite cloudy."
ORIGINAL.
THE BARREN FIG-TREE AND THE CROSS.
O hapless tree! which doth refuse
Thy fruit to him who thee hath made:
Cursed and withered none may use
Thy barren limbs for fruit or shade.
O Cross of death! which man did make,
Barren and fruitless though thou be,
Thy sapless branches life shall take
From that sweet fruit he gave to thee.
O happy tree! divinely blest!
True, thou hast neither leaves nor root;
Yet 'neath thy shade a world shall rest,
And feast upon thy heavenly fruit!
MISCELLANY.
A Peculiar Conglomerate.—Mr. John Keily, of the Irish Geological Society, has addressed a letter to the editor of the Geological Magazine, describing a peculiar conglomerate bed which is on the shore at Cushendeen, in the county of Antrim. The mass is about fifty feet above the sea, and some thirty yards long and wide. It is composed of round pebbles of quartz rock, from two to four inches in diameter; and they occur so closely packed that everyone is in contact with another, and no room left, except for the sand which cements them, and which fills the openings between the pebbles, when originally heaped together. These pebbles, as just stated, are of quartz rock, and therefore all of one kind. There is no actual rock of the same kind, on the shore, nearer than—(1) Malin Head, or Culdaff, in Donegal; (2) Belderg, east of Belmullet in Mayo, where it occupies the shore for fourteen miles; and (3) in the twelve bins, near Clifden, in Connemara, where it forms bands interstratified with mica slate. This mass is backed by a hill of brown Devonian grits and shales interstratified, which extends from Cushendeen to Cushendal. In both those rocks are a few round pebbles of quartz rock, similar to those in the mass on the shore, but in the rocks of the hill they are thinly disseminated, perhaps six or ten of them to a cubic yard. Mr. Kelly desires to know how the quartz pebbles came together unmixed with any other species of rock. The answer which the editor of the Geological Magazine gives in a foot-note seems very like the correct one. It is to the effect that, in the grinding of the several elements which were being rubbed together to form the conglomerate, the softer ones became reduced to powder.—Popular Science Review.