578 
than in a farmhouse ; a change of ownership was accord- 
ingly effected, and on the following day the stone was 
safely deposited on the premises of the Natural History 
Museum, South Kensington. 
The particulars of the fall, as given orally to me by 
Mr. and Mrs. Walker, are as follows :— 
At 10.30 a.m. on Saturday, September 13, which was 
a cloudy morning, W. John Adams, who is in the em- 
ployment of Mr. Walker at Crosshill farm, was gathering 
the house ; he was startled by a noise of such a character 
that he thought it was due to the bursting of the boiler at 
the mill, which is a mile to the south and is situated near 
to Crumlin railway-station. Another loud noise, like that 
of escaping.steam, was followed by the sound as of an 
object striking the ground near by, and a cloud of dust 
immediately arose above the standing corn at a spot only 
twenty yards away from where he was at work. Adams 
ran through the corn towards the cloud of dust and found 
a hole in the soil; thereupon he hurried to the farm- 
yard for a spade, and within a quarter of an hour of the 
fall had extracted a black, dense stone, which had pene- 
trated the soil to a depth of 13 feet and had then been 
stopped by impact against a much larger terrestrial 
| 
jez 
Fic.1.—The Crumlin meteorite (reduced to one-third the natural size). 
View showing the smoother faces, the concavities, and the crack 
probably caused when the meteorite strucka still larger terrestrial stone 
buried in the soil. 
stone. The black stone was hot and, according to Mr. 
Walker, was still warm to the touch even an hour later. 
There was a sulphurous odour. Twoother men were work- 
ing at a haystack twenty yards further away from the hole 
made by the stone and also heard the sounds. Mr. 
Walker, who is seventy-two years of age, had himself just 
gone into the house, which is close by, and heard nothing 
of the explosion. Mrs. Walker told me thai she was in 
the lane on the far side of the house and heard a sound 
comparable for character with that made by a swarm of 
bees, though much more intense, or with the rattling 
noise made by a reaping machine; she said that others 
who had heard it had likened the same sound to that of a 
reaping machine which had run away. It may be men- 
tioned that the sound of a reaping machine is at present 
very familiar to the observers, for the harvest is in pro- 
gress. Mr. Walker had heard that the detonation was 
remarked at Antrim, five miles to the north of Crosshill ; 
at Legoniel, nine miles to the east ; at Lisburn, eleven 
miles to the south-east ; and also at Lurgan, thirteen 
miles south-south-west by south. Mrs. Walker said that 
some of the hearers had taken the sound to herald the 
arrival of the Day of Judgment. As yet there is no 
NO. 1719, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
[OcTOBER 9, 1902 
certain information as to the direction of the line of flight 
of the meteorite. 
As for the stone itself, it weighs 9 lb. 54 oz.; it is 
74 inches long, 64 inches wide and 33 inches thick. Its 
form is irregular and distinctly fragmental; there are 
nine or ten faces, each of them slightly concave or convex ; 
the edges are rounded. Five of the faces are similar to 
each other in character, and, except for minute pittings 
' and projecting points, are smooth ; they show those large 
apples from a tree on the edge of the cornfield and near | 
concavities which are common on meteoric stones, and 
have been likened in shape to “thumb-marks”; the 
remaining faces are different in aspect and have a low 
ridge-and-furrow development ; they are doubtless due 
to fractures during the passage of the stone through the 
earth’s atmosphere, possibly to the break-up at the 
moment of detonation. A crack going nearly half-way 
through the meteorite at a distance of an inch from an 
outer face was probably caused by impact on the larger 
stone met with in the soil. 
The meteorite is virtually completely covered with the 
characteristic crust which is formed during the passage 
of such bodies through the air; the crust is in parts 
black, in parts brown perhaps owing to the influence of 
the soil. On the smoother faces already referred to the 
| —_— | 
| 
[i 
Fic. 2.—The Crumlin meteorite (reduced to one-third the natural size). 
View showing the two dominant kinds of surface. The face on the right 
was probably produced by the breakage of the meteorite at an early 
part of the journey through the earth’s atmosphere. 
crust is thicker than, and different in aspect from, that 
on the remaining faces. From this it is inferred that 
the meteorite broke up in the earth’s atmosphere at an 
early part of its course, when the speed was still so 
enormous that the heat produced by compression of the 
air in front of the quickly moving stone was sufficient to 
scorch the newly broken surface, for a fresh fracture of 
the stone is quite light in colour. In one part the crust 
is iridescent in purple, blue and pink colours. Here and 
there bright particles of a metallic alloy of iron and 
nickel interrupt the continuity of the dark crust. On one 
of the smaller surfaces of latest fracture there is visible 
a section of a large flat nodule of the bronze-coloured 
protosulphide of iron, troilite, which is a characteristic 
mineral constituent of meteorites and is not found as a 
native terrestrial product. Owing to the presence of 
particles of nickel-iron dispersed through the stony 
matter, the meteorite affects the magnetic needle, though 
not to a great extent. 
A mould of the meteorite has been made from which 
models will be prepared ; a detailed mineralogical and 
chemical examination of the material of the stone will be 
at once begun. 
