The Southern Heavens 37 



at Toluca in Mexico, and which he presented to me. 

 I do not know whether there is anybody else who cuts 

 open his magazines with a piece of a star. The Ward- 

 Coonley collection, which was the result of a great 

 expenditure of time, effort, and money, contains speci- 

 mens representing several thousand "falls.' It is one 

 of the most complete collections of its kind now in 

 existence. Ward often visited South America in quest 

 of specimens about which he had heard. He used to 

 tell amusing stories concerning his adventures. No 

 hardship was too great for him to encounter if thereby 

 he could only add another specimen to his collection. 

 A great many meteorites have been found in South 

 America. There is a big one in the museum at Rio de 

 Janeiro, which came from near Bahia. When I was a 

 student, the place which Ward occupied in later years as 

 a collector of meteorites was held by my teacher, Pro- 

 fessor Charles Upham Shepard of Amherst College. 

 He was running a race with Professor Maskelyne of 

 England in an effort to make the most complete col- 

 lection of meteorites in the world, and before his 

 death claimed w r ith apparent justice that the only 

 collection exceeding his own was that preserved in the 

 Imperial Museum in Vienna, The dear old doctor 

 used to lecture most entertainingly and instructively 

 upon the composition of these fragments of stellar 

 matter which he had gathered. Among them, I recall, 

 was a small meteorite which he obtained in a curious 

 way. It fell one afternoon in the fall of the year and 

 struck the roof of a barn, where two men were engaged 

 in flailing buckwheat. It tore away a number of shin- 

 gles from the roof, bounded off, and fell into a field near 

 by. A small dog saw it fall and rushed out into the 

 field and began pawing about the hole. The men, 



