380 REPORT— 1873. 



and shortly afterwards he hoard a sound as distinctly as if three or four 

 cannon had been at ouce discharged at a distance of a quarter of a mile. 

 But the last lighting up of the sky seemed only for an instant, when all was 



as dark as before There must have been a meteor of extraordinary 



size travelling from the southern part of Banffshire on towards the centre of 

 Inverness-shire, and bursting somewhere near the source of the river Nairn. 

 The brilliancy of the light was as if a brilliant flash of lightning had remained 

 visible in the sky." 



Aerolites. — The following extract from a journal of travels in North-west 

 America, 'The great Lone Laud,' by Capt.W. F. Butler, F.E.G.S. (1872), 

 deserves attention, as the existence of the mass of meteoric iron which it 

 describes appears to have been hitherto unknown, or unrecorded. 



" In the mission-house of Victoria (on the Saskatchewan river, not far 

 from its source) there lay a curious block of metal of immense weight ; it was 

 rugged, deeply indented, and polished on the outer edges of the indentations 

 by the wear and friction of many years. Its history was a curious one. 

 Longer than any man could say, it had lain on the summit of a hill far out 

 in the southern prairies. It had been a medicine-stone of surpassing virtue 

 among the Indians over a vast territory. No tribe or portion of a tribe 

 would pass in the vicinity without paying a visit to this great medicine : it 

 ■was said to be increasing yearly in weight. Old men remembered having 

 heard old men say, they had once lifted it easily from the ground. Now no 

 single man could carry it ; and it was no wonder that this metallic stone 

 should bo a ' Manito '-stone, and an object of intense veneration to the 

 Indian ; it had come down from heaven ; it did not belong to the earth, but 

 had descended out of the sky ; it was in fact an aerolite. Not very long 

 before my visit, this curious stone had been removed from the hill upon 

 which it had so long rested, and brought to the mission of Victoria by some 

 person from that jjlace. When the Indians found that it had been taken 

 away, they were loud in the expression of their regret. The old medicine- 

 men declared that its removal would lead to great misfortunes, and that war, 

 disease, and dearth of buffalo would affect the tribes of the Saskatchewan. 

 This was not a i^rophecy made after the occurrence of the plague of small-pox ; 

 for in a magazine published by the Wesle}'an Society in Canada there appears 

 a letter from the missionary setting forth the prediction of the medicine-men 

 a year prior to my visit. The letter concludes with an expression of thanks 

 that their evil prognostications had not been attended with success. But a 

 few months later brought all the three evils upon the Indians; and never, 

 l)robably, since the first trader had reached the country, had so many afflictions 

 of war, famine, and plague fallen upon the Crees and Blackfect as during the 

 year whicli succeeded the useless removal of their Manito-stone from the 

 lone hill-top upon which the skies had cast it." 



Siderite of Augusta County, United States (see * American Journal of 

 Science' for July, 1872). — Analysis of the gases occluded in the iron, by Dr. 

 J. W. Mallet, U.S. (' Proceedings of the Royal Society,' vol. xx. p. 365). 

 Both shavings and a small bar of the iron cut and polished cold, and freed 

 from oil, from the most solid part of the iron were heated first to redness and 

 then to whiteness in the vacuum of a Sprcngel pump. The experiment lasted 

 14^ hours, only a quarter of the whole volume of gas being extracted in the 

 last two thirds of the time, and a small residue still remaining unextracted 

 at its close. Tlic quantity of hydrogen and carbonic acid diminished most 

 rapidly ; and those of nitrogen and carbonic oxide continued to be discharged 

 most abundantly towards the end of the time, as the following Tabic of the 



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