36 REPORT—1849, 
« ¢ The Mahalkurree thought the Patel’s report so extraordinary that he de- 
termined at once to proceed to Negloor himself, to inquire as to its truth, 
which he did; and after having examined the stone itself, as well as the 
hole in the ground made by its fall, and found all the accounts of the villagers 
who were present to agree, he could not avoid coming to the same conclusion 
that they did, regarding its fall from the sky. To place the matter beyond 
doubt, however, he took statements in writing of the circumstances from the 
cultivator Ninga and another, who had heard the rushing noise made by the 
stone in its passage through the air, and forwarded their depositions, with 
his own report and the fragments of the aérolite, to Mr. Goldfinch, the assist- 
ant collector and magistrate in charge of the district, who has kindly placed 
them at my disposal. 
“¢ Had the evidence in proof of the fall of this stone been less conclusive 
than it is, we might still have inferred the fact of its being an a€rolite from its 
peculiar appearance, so different from that of any rock in the neighbourhood 
of the spot where it was found. For miles around the village of Negloor, the 
only rocks to be found are primary clay-slate of various degrees of induration, 
and occasional dykes, masses and boulders of greenstcne, but not a trace of 
any volcanic product, or other stone bearing the remotest resemblance to the 
one under consideration. The latter, moreover, tallies exactly with the de- 
scriptions given of aérolites. It is coated with the fused crust or film charac- 
teristic of these bodies, and is evidently highly metallic. On the theory of © 
aérolites being planetary bodies which become fused on their surfaces, and 
burst by the sudden evolution of heat occasioned by their rushing at immense 
velocities into our atmosphere, the specimen now forwarded may be supposed 
to have formed part of a globe, or rather a mass approaching the spherical 
shape, of somewhat more than a foot in diameter, which burst into fragments 
under these circumstances; and the difference in appearance of the position 
of the fused film over the rounded part of the specimen, which may be con- 
sidered to be a portion of the surface of the original globe, and of that coating 
the remaining parts, which according to this view were the rough broken 
surfaces of the detached fragment, would seem to favour this explanation. 
‘< ¢ These remarks, however, are merely thrown out in the way of conjecture, 
as I do not pretend to any knowledge that would entitle me to theorize on 
the subject at all. My object in writing at so much length has been to show 
that the specimen now sent is a part of a true aérolite, and as such, I hope it 
will be thought worthy of a place in the new Museum.’ 
“The mass of stone which accompanied this was somewhat ovoidal: it 
weighed four pounds, measuring fifteen inches round the larger, and eleven 
round the shorter axis. It was covered over with a black-looking vitrified 
crust about one-twentieth of an inch in thickness. This refused to yield to 
the action of muriatic, nitric, or sulphuric acids. One end of it was marked 
with impressions such as a slightly softened body might receive on being 
thrown violently against the earth. The specific gravity of the crust was a 
little over three, or somewhat heavier than marble; it had not been quite 
accurately determined, from the difficulty of separating the crust from the 
interior. The interior of the aérolite was exactly like softish white sandstone ; 
it crushed between the fingers, and absorbed, when immersed an hour in 
water, one-hundredth of its weight. Its specific gravity was 3°5, or a third 
heavier than the heaviest sandstone, that of quartz being 2°6. It slightly 
effervesced with muriatic acid, giving off much sulphuretted hydrogen gas, 
and then slowly dissolved into a glutinous mass. It seemed full of metallic 
particles, which shone beautifully under a moderate magnifying power, with 

