XX. Crystals of Iron

Extract

At the General Meeting of the Society held at the rooms of the Royal Microscopical Society, King's College, London, on March 14th, 1877, were exhibited some octahedral crystals of iron, which were procured from a hollow cavity in the middle of a bar of pig iron. The way in which they came into my possession was this.

A friend was walking on the Docks at Liverpool some years ago, watching a vessel being unloaded, which had arrived freighted with pig iron from Gartsherrie. These pigs were lifted by cranes, and one accidentally slipped, and dropped on to its end, and was fractured in two pieces, showing a cavity about the size of a duck's egg, and his attention was drawn to some bright lustrous objects which he saw roll out of the cavity. These he at once picked up, and found they were crystals of the metal, octahedral in shape, and about ⅗ of an inch in size.