WARD — BACUBIRITO, 69 



capital, where they are mounted on huge iron pillars in the entrance 

 court of the School of Mines. 



Having during the last fifteen years paid visits to most of these 

 Mexican meteorite localities, seeing most of the large masses before 

 they had been remoxed from the spot where they fell, and where 

 some of them had lain perhaps for many centuries, the writer acquired 

 great interest in all that pertained to them. While in the capital a 

 few months ago, studying and cutting some of the large pieces in the 

 Museo Nacional, the writer sought almost in vain in scientific circles 

 for substantiation and defining of stories which have long been current 

 relating to an enormous iron meteorite existing in the State of Sinaloa, 

 far in the northwest portion of the Republic. 



The first and, so far as we can find, the only positive notice of 

 this meteorite was in 1876. Then Seiior Mariano Barcena, a noted 

 Mexican scientist and astronomer, in a 5-page article in the Proceed- 

 ings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences devoted to Mexican 

 meteorites, notices "an enormous meteoric mass lately discovered in 

 the State of Sinaloa." He says, " I can assure the Academy that its 

 length was more than twelve feet." Many years later Castillo in his 

 catalogue of Mexican meteorites refers to this same mass, giving its 

 length at 3.65 metres ; with 2 metres in height and 1.50 metres thick. 

 Three years later, Eastman, of the United States Naval Observatory, 

 taking the above measures as being correct, estimated its weight 

 as 40,800 kilograms or about 42 tons. Brezina, Cohen and Wiilfing 

 speak of it as weighing 50 tons, and as being the largest 

 meteorite in the world. But in all this there was no definite 

 description of the mass, and no one who mentioned it claimed 

 to have seen it. We were anxious to ascertain about all this. The 

 Mexican savants were all interested in having this great celestial body 

 investigated. One of them, Sefior Jose C. Aguilera, the Director of 

 the Instituto Geologico, a government institution, and the present 

 headquarters of the Geological Survey of the Republic, aided us in 

 obtaining from the Minister of State letters to the Governor of Sinaloa 

 and to the Director of Mines in that State. We had decided to visit 

 Bacubirito, for so the place and the meteorite itself were called, and 

 see what was fact and what was rumor about it. So on the 2nd 

 of April of the present year we started out to resolve the matter. 

 Sinaloa is a hard State to reach from the City of Mexico. One must 

 pass far around to the north through the United States, returning 

 south through Sonora, a journey of over 2,000 miles, or go by the 

 Pacific coast, a shorter but harder route. We took this latter, cross- 



