166 REPORT— 1876. 



from a minute examination of meteorites, that the materials and the laws 

 of aggregation of the elementary substances constituting the largest and the 

 smallest suns and planets are essentially the same, only differing very strikingly 

 from each other in their scale. Conditions which we notice on the sun and 

 on our own globe we may regard as having in all probability once presided 

 over the process of condensation of every planet from a state of vapour, and 

 as having notably collected on the surfaces of the small meteorite-yielding 

 planetoids, in exact proportion to their size, less oxygen than we find existing 

 on the surface of the earth. Passing over many valuable pages of descriptive 

 matter in the ' Notes,' containing exact accounts and appropriate discussions 

 of many new as well as formerly narrated particulars and observations, it 

 should be stated that the explanation given in one of the first paragraphs 

 of the first article in ' Nature ' (loco sk^. cit. p. 487) of the characteristic 

 pittings of the surfaces of meteoric stones and irons, supposing them to arise 

 from exfoliation of pieces of the stone or iron by the sudden expansion of the 

 material produced by heat, is set aside in a later paper by Professor Maskelyne 

 in favour of a far more natural and more probable hypothesis, the leading 

 points of which will be presently described. 



The meteoric fall of the greatest interest during the past year was that of 

 an aerosiderite, or piece of metallic iron, which fell in Shropshire, eight or ten 

 miles north of the Wrekiu, on the 20th of April, 1876. Rain was falling 

 heavily, unaccompanied by lightning or thunder, and the skj' was thickly 

 overcast for some time before and after the hour, 3'' 40" p.m., when the event 

 took jjlace. At that time a strange rumbling noise was heard, followed by a 

 startling explosion like a discharge of heavy artillery, audible over an area 

 several miles in extent among the neighbouring villages of Shropshire. The 

 meteorite was found about an hour after this occurrence by the tenant of a 

 grass field, near the town of Wellington, Mr. Brooks, who had occasion to 

 visit the spot, and observing the ground to have been disturbed, probed the 

 hole which the meteorite had made, and discovered it at a depth of 18 inches 

 below the surface. Some men at work at no great distance had heard the 

 noise of its descent, but without being able to indicate the exact place or its 

 direction. The hole was nearly perpendicular, the meteorite having entered 

 the ground almost vertically in a north-west to south-easterly direction, and 

 Avhen found it was still quite warm. It weighs 7| lbs., and is a mass of 

 metallic iron irregularly angular, although aU its edges appear to have been 

 rounded by fiision in its transit through the air, and, except at the jjoint 

 where it first struck the ground, it is covered with a thin black pellicle of the 

 magnetic oxide of iron. The surface is somewhat pitted or marked with 

 slight depressions, one of which occurring in a fiscure of the mass affords some 

 instructive evidence of the causes of their formation. The exposed metallic 

 part of the surface exhibits crystalline structure vcrj- clearly when it is etched. 

 The meteorite was first exhibited publicly at a local bazaar, held in Wolver- 

 hampton, and afterwards at a meeting of the Natural History Society of Bir- 

 mingham, by whose representations to the agent of the Duke of Cleveland, 

 and by the Duke's consent, in whose property it fell, it was presented to the 

 British Museum. It is only the seventh aerosiderite, or meteoric iron, of 

 which the fall has been witnessed*, although upwards of a hundred iron 

 masses have been discovered in different parts of the globe, which are un- 



* For a list of the earlier known examples of sneli ironfalls, sec these Eeports (vol. 

 forl§7fi,p.24G), 



