186 ‘TRANSACTIONS OF THE [MAY 27, 
THE PIPE-CREEK METEORITE. 
The meteorite presented herewith was found by a farmer 
named J. W. Scott, in December, 1887, on the lands owned by 
the firm of F. W. Gross & Company, near Pipe Creek, Brandera 
County, Texas, thirty-five miles southwest of San Antonio, It 
was supposed to be an ore of some kind, and was broken up, and 
a piece sent to my firm to be assayed. Unfortunately the speci- 
men was not particularly scrutinized, but, like other samples 
constantly coming in for assay, was handed to a man to pulver- 
ize, who succeeded in breaking up a large portion of it. The 
difficulty which he experienced in pulverizing it led to his 
bringing is to me, and to my giving it a more careful examina- 
tion, when I saw that it was of meteoric origin. After consid- 
erable correspondence, I have obtained the whole of the speci- 
men. It is here shown, minus the pulverized portion. It 
originally weighed thirty pounds, and, as described by the farmer 
who found it, its shape was ‘‘like a loaf of baker’s bread.” It is 
essentially a spheroid flattened on the side which struck the 
earth when it fell. It was clearly in a semi-fluid.or pasty con- 
dition, and flattened out. The locality is prairie land, and the 
finder was attracted by the stone slightly protruding from the 
hard clay soil, quite near a roadway, down which he had often 
passed without previously observing the meteorite. 
There is upon the exterior an oxidized crust showing the ef- 
fect of heat and weathering. The interior has a somewhat crys- 
talline appearance to the eye, thickly dotted with pellets or ir- 
regularly shaped nodules of soft iron, none of them larger than 
a quarter of an inch in diameter. Near the surface they are all 
rounded by the heat action. Hxamination of fragments with 
a microscope, and of a polished surface, shows, in addition 
to the metallic particles, iron pyrites, occasionally in perfect oc- 
tahedra, and olivine,—both yellow and green varieties,—with 
amorphous silica or silicates. 
I have given our fellow-member, Mr. George F. Kunz, a por- 
tion of the specimen, at his request, for micro-petrographic study 
of a thin section. I believe he intends to give you the result of 
his examination in the fall. 
An examination of the fractured mass shows it to be of the 
ordinary type of stone meteorites. The color is gray, and lustre 
somewhat vitreous. The metallic particles are quite evenly dis- 
tributed through the mass. 
A chemical analysis was made as follows:—The metallic portion, 
by attrition and with the magnet, was freed from the stony 
matrix. The mass consisted, by weight, of 
