1905.] NATURAL SCIE.XCES OF PHILADELPHIA. S75 



conceivable to me, as I have already stated, that this material could 

 have been produced in the quantities in which we find it in any other 

 way than by a heavy blow. 



III. The impact of an extra-terrestrial body. 



I shall attempt now to describe briefly such facts as are evident to 

 any geologist making an examination of the region which furnish strong 

 affirmative evidence that this crater could have been made only by an 

 extra-terrestrial body falling out of space and moving at great speed. 

 Something between ten and fifteen tons of meteoric iron have been 

 shipped away from this locality, most of it going to the various museums 

 of the world. It is a fact, so far as I know, that none of the "iron 

 shale" or magnetic iron oxide, which will be described hereafter, is to 

 be found in any of these museums; why I cannot understand, for the 

 scientific interest which attaches to it is very great. It is probably 

 not generally known that by far the greater portion of the meteoric 

 iron which has been shipped from this locality has been found lying 

 on the plain immediately surrounding the crater, and much of it has 

 been found on the rim itself. At Caiion Diablo a merchant, Mr. F. 

 W. Volz, tells me he has shipped nearly ten tons of this iron, and he 

 also tells me that before he came to the country a merchant from 

 Winslow shipped perhaps half as much. Both of these merchants 

 hired Mexicans to look for iron specimens in the neighborhood of the 

 crater. These men discovered several pieces weighing from 600 to 

 over 1,000 pounds. 



Since we have come into possession of the property we have found 

 several thousand pieces, in all something over a ton, of various sized 

 fragments of meteoric iron, the largest weighing as I remember 225 

 pounds, down to pieces weighing much less than an ounce or only a 

 few grains. These meteoric iron specimens (known to the scientific 

 world as the Canon Diablo siderites) are so well known that I shall not 

 attempt to describe them. The following analysis by Messrs. Booth, 

 Garrett and Blair, of Philadelphia, may be taken as representing the 

 general composition of these irons : Si 0.047 ; S 0.004 ; P 0.179 ; C 0.417 ; 

 Ni 7.940; Fe 91.39G; total 99.983. In the present discussion it is far 

 more interesting to state that the}' have been found more or less con- 

 centrically distributed around the crater and to an extreme distance, 

 so far as we know, of two and one-half miles from it, a few small speci- 

 mens having been found in Canon Diablo gorge. It is a remarkable 

 fact that these so-called ' ' irons ' ' (to distinguish them from the so-called 

 "iron shale") are very angular in shape, indicating by their fracture 

 that they may have been violently torn off or burned from similar ma- 



