Among the curiosities of more modern date is a silver-mounted punch-bowl of Inveraray marble, formerly the property of the poet Burns, and presented by his widow to Alexander Cunningham. Not far distant rests the Lochbuy brooch, a massive ornament four inches in diameter, said to date from about the year 1500, and to have been fashioned out of silver found on the estate of Lochbuy, in Mull. Its centre is a large crystal, surrounded by upright collets bearing pearls of considerable size. It was long preserved as a sort of heirloom in the Lochbuy family, but passed out of it by the marriage of a female representative, and in course of time became part of the Bernal Collection, whence it was acquired by the British Museum. Hard by it is a handsomely carved casket, made of the wood of Shakspeare’s mulberry tree, and presented in 1769, with the freedom of the town of Stratford-on-Avon, to David Garrick. The majority of the exhibits, however, belong to very much earlier periods. There is a choice display of horn and tortoiseshell snuff and tobacco boxes, two of the latter—duplicates, save in some unimportant particulars—bearing the arms of Sir Francis Drake, and the representation of a ship in full sail. We are told that boxes of this same pattern are frequently offered to collectors as having been the personal property of the great admiral; but an inscription on one of the specimens here exhibited shows that they were actually made by one John Obrisset in 1712. An ordinary-looking piece of rock-crystal in one of the cases claims to be the veritable ‘show-stone’ or divining crystal of Dr Dee, the celebrated astrologer and alchemist of Queen Elizabeth’s time. Dee’s own account of the origin of the show-stone was as follows. He declared that one day in November 1582, while he was engaged in prayer, the angel Uriel appeared to him and presented him with a magic crystal, which had the quality, when steadfastly gazed into, of presenting visions, and even of producing articulate sounds. These sights and sounds, however, were only perceptible to a person endowed with the proper mediumistic faculty. This the doctor himself unfortunately lacked; but such a person was soon found in one Edward Kelly, who was engaged as the doctor’s assistant, and produced ‘revelations’ with Joseph-Smith-like facility. Indeed, his revelations had more than one point in common with those of the Mormon apostle, for it is recorded that on one occasion he received a divine command that he and the doctor should exchange wives, which edifying little family arrangement was actually carried out, with much parade of prayer and religious ceremonial. It seems probable that Dee really believed in the manifestations, and was himself the dupe of his unscrupulous associate. Kelly was accustomed to describe what he saw and heard in the magic crystal, and Dr Dee took notes of the mystic revelations. These notes were, in 1659, collected and published in a folio volume