H. HENSOLDT ON CAVITIES IN METEORITES. 187 



eyes and ears would not Lave carried much weight against hostile 

 scientific opinion at large. The meteoric mass was brought to my 

 father by a young student of Braunfels, a native of that place, 

 named Otto Muller, who stated that he had obtained it from a 

 shepherd of St. Georgen, a small village, or rather suburb of 

 Braunfels, and who had obtained it under precisely the conditions 

 already described. This shepherd, an old man named Schiitz, 

 whom both my father and myself afterwards repeatedly interrogated, 

 corroborated the statement of the student Muller, and at our re- 

 quest accompanied us to the scene of the occurrence, a field on 

 the slope of a hill, about a mile and a half from the town, where 

 the traces of some recent digging were pointed out to us, which we 

 carefully examined, without however, deriving much information 

 from that circumstance, for, apart from the distortion apparently 

 caused by the digging instrument, the rain had softened and 

 altered the appearance of the original depression. I may here re- 

 mark that my father, before removing to the neighbouring town of 

 Wetzlar, had resided in Braunfels for nearly twelve years, where, 

 owing to his known taste for natural history, the farmers and 

 peasants were in the habit of bringing to him whatever in the way 

 of curiosities they happened to meet with in field or wood, be it 

 plants, insects, or strange-looking stones. We have no reason to 

 doubt the words of the student or shepherd ; the material was 

 brought by the former as a meteorite, and no reward, pecuniary or 

 otherwise, was claimed or expected. 



Starting now from what appeared, and still appears to us, so 

 convincing an evidence of the meteoric origin of the specimen, every 

 further examination of the latter itself, in our eyes at least, con- 

 firmed it. Had the substance been undistinguishable from a piece 

 of Basalt or Granite, we should still have been satisfied of its 

 meteoric character, so convinced are we of the accuracy of our in- 

 formation respecting the circumstances of its discovery. But here 

 was an object which, in addition to these circumstances, possessed 

 all the characteristic features of a meteorite, and which was 

 unlike any mineral or rock specimen we had ever seen. It was 

 blackish, heavy, and composed in great part of what surprisingly 

 resembles metallic iron. It was furthermore possessed of that test- 

 feature of true meteorites — a hard crust — with numerous sand 

 grains imbedded, pointing to the conclusion that it must have been 

 in a state of fusion. If all these qualities are deceptive, I confess 



