TEKTITES — BEYER 257 



around such great known meteorite craters as those of Arizona, 

 Wabar, Henbury, etc., and are believed to have been produced by the 

 fusing of earthly rocks and sands by the terrific heat resulting from 

 the explosive impact of the huge meteorites which produced such 

 craters. An explosion great enough to produce a crater a mile or 

 more in diameter would doubtless throw molten silica and other fused 

 material a vast distance into the air, and such material would tend 

 to assume the geometric forms common to glass drops, hardening as 

 it fell back toward the earth. At the time of first propounding this 

 view, in 1933, Spencer felt that the origin of tektites might be thus 

 explained, but in his more recent writing he admits the difficulty of 

 explaining the widespread Australites and Indo-Malaysianites on 

 such grounds. The chief argument in favor of this view of tektite 

 origin is that the composition of tektites approaches that of some 

 earthly clays, but one would need to presuppose temperatures much 

 higher and craters much vaster than any yet known on the earth. 

 (However, we must await more detailed study of the great lunar 

 craters, now coming to be regarded as mainly meteoritic in origin, 

 and consider also the possibility that such great craters may have been 

 destroyed or largely covered by erosion and vegetational growth 

 on the earth.) 



The present writer has expressed no personal opinion in favor of 

 any of these theories of tektite origin, but has attempted merely to 

 point out from time to time some of the arguments against or in 

 favor of each of the views. The same attitude will be preserved as 

 regards the new Rufus hj'pothesis presented herewith. 



AN ASTRONOiMICAL THEORY OP TEKTITES 



Under this title Prof. W. Carl Rufus, of the Observatory and 

 Astronomical Department of the University of Michigan, has pre- 

 sented to the writer a new explanation for the origin of tektites which 

 was published in another paper.- For the present, I wish only, 

 then, briefly to summarize the essentials of his theory here, and to 

 advance a few short arguments for and against it. The essentials 

 of the theory follow : 



The small natural-glass bodies known as tektites were originally de- 

 rived in major part from the glassy basalt, or tachylyte, which forms 

 the deeper crustal layer of the earth, exposed chiefly on the floor of the 

 Pacific basin, at the time of the fissional separation of the moon. 

 Furthermore, the earthly tektites represent only a small section of the 

 vast swarms of tiny satellites which remained revolving about the 

 earth within the Roche limit and particularly that section of the 

 satellites having a revolutional period closely coinciding with the 



' Pop. Astron., vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 49-51, January 1940. 



