258 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



family. It weighs rather more than a pound, and had been preserved 

 by the family as a nut-cracker." * 



About the year 1880, a fragment of iron, said to weigh eleven 

 pounds, was found in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, in regard to 

 which Fletcher says : " The finder and his official agent, thinking 

 it a piece of rich iron ore, searched unsuccessfully for a vein : the 

 specimen itself was taken to a country smith's shop, heated, and cut 

 with a cold chisel ; the fragments were distributed as specimens of 

 iron ore. Some time afterwards, two of them, weighing respectively 

 63 oz. and 31 oz., were given by the agent to Mr. Matthew A. Miller, 

 Civil Engineer, of Richmond, Virginia ; convinced of their meteoric 

 origin, he immediately tried to recover the pieces already distributed, 

 but after travelling several hundred miles was forced to the conclusion 

 that they were irrecoverably lost." f 



Later still Mr. George F. Kunz describes three small pieces from 

 Wayne County, West Virginia, the largest of the three only weighing 

 a little over half a pound, the rest of the original mass having 

 been broken up and distributed.! The Wayne County specimens 

 were sent to the writer by Mr. Kunz before being described, and 

 were identified at once as more of the Cocke County iron. In con- 

 nection with this iron a supposed fall of a meteorite in the direction 

 of Wayne County some five years previous was quoted, but any one 

 familiar with meteorites knows how frecpjently such accounts have to 

 be rejected, even when the observer thinks the specimen fell at his 

 feet, and that he picked it up while still too hot to hold. 



Another piece of the Cocke County iron was given to Professor 

 N. S. Shaler in 1887, purporting to be a sample of a vein of native iron 

 of indefinite extent, near Lebanon, Wilson County, Tennessee. It 

 may be that this fragment was originally broken off from the Smith- 

 ville irons and that they were the iron vein referred to, since they 

 were found not far from the Lebanon Turnpike, though in the adjacent 

 county. 



The map on the opposite page, drawn to scale, will give an idea 

 of the distribution of the counties in which the various irons under 

 discussion were found. 



At first one might be led to suppose that these numerous masses 

 of iron resulted from a wide-spread shower, but on looking over the 



* American Journal of Science, 2d ser., Vol. IV. p. 84, 1847. 



t Mineralogical Magazine, Vol. VII. p. 183, 1887. 



t American Journal, 3d ser., Vol. XXXI. p. 146, 1886. 



