PHILIPPINE TEKTITES AND THE TEKTITE PROBLEM IN 



GENERAL 1 



By H. Otlet Beyer 



Department of Anthropology 



University of the Philipinnes, Manila 



One of several things for which the Philippines are remarkable is 

 the presence in the Islands of the world's largest known deposit of 

 tektites. The term "tektite" was adopted in 1900 by Prof. Franz E. 

 Suess, of Vienna, as a general name for a curious group of natural 

 glasses which have come to be widely regarded as of cosmic or extra- 

 earthly origin. In recent times it has become apparent that these 

 bodies did not fall singly or sporadically, but that great showers of 

 them fell upon certain parts of the earth at widely separated geologic 

 periods. A small deposit has been found in the Ivory Coast region of 

 West Africa that is believed to date as far back as Mesozoic times ; the 

 Moldavites, or European tektites, date from the Helvetian strata of 

 the mid-Miocene; the whole group of Far Eastern tektites, or Indo- 

 Malaysianites, are undoubtedly mid-Pleistocene; while the Austra- 

 lites, or tektites of Australia and Tasmania, are believed to be post- 

 Pleistocene or recent. These four major geologic groups of tektites 

 all differ from one another to some extent in physical appearance, 

 chemical composition, and specific gravity, but all possess certain com- 

 mon differences from other earthly rocks which have led them to be 

 classed together as genuine tektites, of unknown but probably cosmic 

 origin. 



Most if not all true tektites appear to have been originally of the 

 natural shapes that would be assumed by molten glass revolving in the 

 atmosphere or any similar gaseous medium, i. e., spheroids, disks, or 

 oval, cylindrical, dumbbell-shaped, and pointed, drop-shaped bodies, 

 some later broken or exploded into fragments of various sizes. This 

 fact, together with their anomalous chemical composition, and the 

 further fact of their being found frequently in wholly nonvolcanic re- 

 gions, have been the chief reasons for adopting the cosmic hypothesis 



1 Paper read at the seventh annual meeting of the Society for Research on Meteorites, 

 Columbus, Ohio, December 1939. Reprinted by permission from Contributions of the 

 Society for Research on Meteorites, Popular Astronomy, vol. 48, No. 1, January 1940. 



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