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Paris, it is used for plastering walls for a hard finish. Within a few years, gypsum burnt with alum, called alumed plaster, has been used in the arts. It is harder and more beautiful than common plaster, and like some alabasters, has considerable transparency.

It is thus prepared: After the plaster is burnt, it is immediately saturated with alum water; after having been wet for about six hours, the water is poured off, the plaster dried in the sun and again burnt. It is then used like common plaster, but moistened with a solution of alum instead of water. Mixed with half sand, it acquires great hardness.

According to the last census there were three hundred and twenty-one mills in the United States for grinding gypsum, and the value of the product amounts to $2,500,000. Most of this is used in the States east of the Mississippi river and north of the cotton States for improving the soil and crops.

There is no doubt but that Texas has vast wealth in her gypsum now lying dormant for want of cheap transportation. When railroads extend to the gypsum region, this wealth will begin to be realized. At present Texas imports most of the gypsum used in the arts and for finishing the walls of buildings.

For further notice of iron ores, see manufactures.

METEORIC IRON.

In the State collection is a specimen of this weighing three hundred and fifteen pounds. It is said to have been found on the head waters of the Red River, northward of Young county. It was an object of worship or veneration to the Indians, who revered it as foreign to the earth and coming from the Great Spirit. In 1858 or '59 Maj. Neighbors, then in command at Fort Belknap, sent a wagon after the meteorite and had it brought into the fort. It was thence sent in a government wagon to San Antonio and onward to Austin.

Various have been the conjectures as to the origin of metorites, some asserting that they came from volcanoes in the moon, having been thrown beyond her centre of gravity, but few if any now believe this. Others think they are fragments of a broken planet, and others think that they belong to a large class of meteors flying through