352 MEMOIRS NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, VOL. XIII. 



Sorby 7 made the following mention of the structure of the meteorite: 



Passing from the structure of individual crystals to that of the aggregate we find that in some cases we have a 

 structure in every respect analogous to that of erupted lavas, though even then there are very curious differences in 

 detail. By methods like those adopted by Daubree there ought to be no more difficulty in artificially imitating the 

 structure of such meteorites than in imitating that of our ordinary volcanic rocks. It is, however, doubtful whether 

 meteorites of any considerable size uniformly possess this structure. The best examples I have seen are only fragments 

 inclosed in the general mass of the Petersburg meteorite which, like many others, has exactly the same kind of structure 

 as that of consolidated volcanic tuff or ashes. 



Wadsworth 8 classed the meteorite as a basalt. Tschermak 9 continued Rose's classification 

 as a eukrite, but Brezina 10 grouped it as a howardite. 



The meteorite is distributed but Wulfing " lists only 399 grams, of which Berlin possesses 

 73 grams and the British Museum 53 grams. Ward n possesses 224 grams, in addition probably 

 to that listed by Wulfing. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



1. 1856: Smith. (In Safford's report of the geology of Tennessee for 1855). Geol. Reconnoissance Surv. Tennessee, 



Nashville, 1856. 



2. 1857: Shepard. Notice of a meteoric stone which fell at Petersburg, Lincoln County, Tennessee, August 5, 1855. 



Amer. Journ. Sci., 2d ser., vol. 24, pp. 134-137. (Analysis by J. L. Smith.) 



3. 1861: Smith. Description of three new meteorites. — Lincoln County meteoric stone which fell in August, 1855. 



Amer. Journ. Sci., 2d ser., vol. 31, pp. 264-265. 



4. 1863: Rose. Meteoriten, pp. 30, 126, 135-137, 156. 



5. 1859-1865: von Reichenbach. No. 20, p. 620. 



6. 1870: Rammelsberg. Meteoriten, pp. 127, and 129-131. 



7. 1877: Sorby. On the structure and origin of Meteorites. "Nature," vol. 15, p. 496. 



8. 1884: Wadsworth. Studies, p. 196. 



9. 1883-1885: Tschermak. Photographien, pp. 6 and 7. 



10. 1885: Brezina. Wiener Sammlung, pp. 174 and 232. 



11. 1897: Wulfing. Die Meteoriten in Sammlungen, pp. 275-276. 



12. 1904: Ward. Catalogue of the Ward-Coonley collection, p. 59. 



PIPE CREEK. 



Bandera County, Texas. 



Latitude 29° 43' N., longitude 98° 50' W. 



Stone. Veined crystalline chondrite (Cka); Erxlel>enite (type 34) of Meunier. 



Found 1887; described 1888. 



Weight, 13.5 kgs. (30 lbs). 



The first and principal account of this meteorite was by Ledoux ' as follows: 



The meteorite presented herewith was found by a farmer named J. W. Scott in December, 1S87, on the lands owned 

 by the firm of F. W. Gross & Co. near Pipe Creek, Bandera County, Texas, 35 miles southwest of San Antonio. It was 

 supposed to be an ore of some kind and was broken up and a piece sent to my firm to be assayed. Unfortunately the 

 specimen was not particularly scrutinized but, like other samples constantly coming in for assay, was handed to a man 

 to pulverize who succeeded in breaking up a large portion of it. The difficulty which he experienced in pulverizing 

 it led to his bringing it to me and to my giving it a more careful examination, when I saw that it was of meteoric origin. 

 After considerable correspondence I have obtained the whole of the specimen. It originally weighed 30 pounds and as 

 described by the farmer who found it its shape was "like a loaf of baker's bread." It is essentially a spheroid, 

 flattened on the side which struck the earth. When it fell it was clearly in a semifluid or pasty condition and 

 flattened out. The locality is prairie land and the finder was attracted by the stone slightly protruding from the 

 hard clay soil quite near a roadway, down which he had often passed without previously observing the meteorite. 



There is upon the exterior an oxidized crust, showing the effect of heat and weathering. The interior has a some- 

 what crystalline appearance to the eye, thickly dotted with pellets or irregularly shaped nodules of soft iron, none of 

 them larger than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Near the surface they are all rounded by the heat action. Exami- 

 nation of the fragments with a microscope, and of a polished surface, shows, in addition to the metallic particles, iron 

 pyrites, occasionally in perfect octahedra, and olivine — both yellow and green varieties — with amorphous silica or 

 silicates. * * * 



I have given our fellow member, Mr. George F. Kunz, a portion of the specimen for micro-petrographic study of 

 a thin section. I believe he intends to give you the result of his examination in the fall. 



An examination of the fractured mass shows it to be of the ordinary type of stone meteorites. The color is gray 

 and the luster somewhat vitreous. The metallic particles are quite evenly distributed through the mass. 





