PROCEEDINGS 



OF THE 



AMERICAN ACADEMY 



OF 



ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



VOL. XXVI. 

 PAPERS READ BEFORE THE ACADEMY. 



I. 



THE PREHISTORIC AND KIOWA COUNTY 

 PALLASITES. 



By Oliver Whipple Huntington, Ph. D. 



Presented April 8, 1891. 



In the Harvard Collection of Meteorites there is a small specimen of 

 a pallas iron which is very highly prized as having the oldest authentic 

 record. It is the main portion of a specimen which was found by 

 Prof. F. W. Putnam in 1883 on the altar of Mound No. 4 of the 

 Turner Group, in the Little Miami valley, Ohio. Therefore it is 

 entered in the Harvard Catalogue as " Prehistoric." Ever since the 

 acquisition of this Prehistoric specimen, specialists have been interested 

 in trying to identify the main mass from which the smaller individual 

 must have come. Figure 1, Plate I., shows the specimen of nearly its 

 natural size as it came from the mound. 



When the meteorite was first placed in the Harvard collection, the 

 author of this paper made a careful study of the character and arrange- 

 ment of the various constituents of the mass, thinking it possible that 

 it might be identified with some of the pallas irons from the desert of 

 Atacama, South America, which it appeared to resemble, thus indicat- 

 ing that the old builders of the mounds had visited that part of the 

 world at some period in the remote past, and had brought away the 



VOL. XXVI. (N. 8. XVIII.) 1 



