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by edward j. olsen 

 curator, mineralogy 



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The Barranger Crater, near Winslow, Arizona, is nearly a mile across. U.S. Route 66 is the faint line visible beyond the crater. 



'"Make a wish on a falling star." At one time or another 

 most children have given this fanciful method a try to ob- 

 tain some much desired toy or treat. As yet there have been 

 no reports of successful attempts to get, say, a bicycle this 

 way, however, falling stars have, over the centuries, pro- 

 vided men with answers and clues to much more sophisti- 

 cated wishes. Ever since man became aware of the universe 

 around him he has had a burning desire to know what's 

 "ovit there." One of the earliest sciences to be born was 

 astronomy, which literally means "to order the stars." As- 

 tronomy grew partly out of necessity, to construct a calendar 

 which would permit the prediction of seasons for the pur- 

 pose of planting crops. 1 1 grew also out of an overwhelming 

 curiosity. Already in the Stone Age the basic ideas of the 

 calendar were created; recent findings have shown that 

 England's famous Stonchenge was an actual working cal- 

 endar. By Egyptian and Greek times calendars had grown 

 to be quite accurate. This left curiosity. 



In olden times any curious object or phenomenon thai 

 took place in the "air" was called a "meteor." Thus people 

 lumped together such unrelated things as comets, tornados, 

 aurora, fog, rainbows, water spouts, sun dogs, moon halos, 

 rain, meteorites, lightning, thunder, clouds, snow, and swamp 

 fires. Because of this, much later in the 19th and 20th cen- 



turies, the study of weather came to be called meteorology, or 

 the study of phenomena that take place in the air. With 

 time it became obvious that some of these phenomena, such 

 as comets and meteorites had nothing to do with the weather 

 as such. The objects which retained the basic name, mete- 

 orites, meaning meteor rocks or rocks that come through the 

 air, were thus rightly excluded from meteorology. 



Meteorites have had a long, but spotty, history. The 

 chance of a person actually witnessing a meteorite fall is ex- 

 tremely small. On the other hand, the chance of seeing 

 burning meteor streaks, what children call "falling stars," 

 in the night sky is fairly good. Thus in prehistoric times 

 when the population of ancient men was quite small the 

 absolute number of witnessed falls would necessarily be 

 small. As the population increased and spread over wider 

 areas the absolute number of direct observations must have 

 increased also. When the first witnessed fall took place is, 

 of course, buried in prehistory. The first recorded case we 

 have is that of an iron meteorite which fell in the ancient 

 country of Phrygia, in Asia Minor, around 2000 B.C. It was 

 put into a temple as an object of worship and later, in Ro- 

 man times, was transported to Rome where it remained for 

 500 years before being lost. In the New World the Mound 

 Builders of the Ohio valley, around 400 B.C., had a small 



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