NO. 5 HEXAHEDRITES — HENDERSON \'J 



Flynn of Alpine, Tex., it was described by Merrill in 1922 as the 

 Alpine, Brewster County, meteorite. Although it is reported that 

 the original body weighed nearly 2 tons, the piece accessioned in 

 the national collections weighs only 212 grams. Apparently the 

 main mass has vanished. 



Merrill's published picture shows that the specimen probably was 

 reheated, but how and where this took place is not known. Actu- 

 ally, the entire surface of the small specimen is granulated, but the 

 texture of the zone near the surface is finer grained than that of the 

 central part. There is no indication of either cleavage or Neumann 

 lines. The chemical analysis Merrill reports is consistent with that 

 of other hexahedrites, and Merrill suggested the possibility that this 

 specimen is related to the Coahuila meteorite. 



Table 5. — Data on hexahedrites from Coahuila, Mexico, and Texas-Oklahoma 



arranged by latitude. 

 Meteorite Date found Latitude Longitude 



Coahuila, Mexico 1837 28°40' N. lOZ^SO' W. 



Kendall County, Tex 1887 29°24' N. 98°30' W. 



Chico Mountain, Tex 1915 29° N. 103°15'W. 



Richland, Tex 1951 3r59' N. 96°14'W. 



Iredell, Tex 1898 31°58' N. 97°52' W. 



Soper, Okla 1938 34°5' N. 95°37' W. 



Southeastern United States. — The hexahedrites from this area are 

 arranged in table 6 according to the increasing latitudes of their 

 points of discovery. Figure 4 shows the arrangement on a map of 

 all of these finds with the exception of the Cincinnati iron, the 

 omission of which is explained below. The distance from the south- 

 ernmost one, Tombigbee River, Ala., to the northernmost, Mt. 

 Joy, Pa., is approximately 850 miles. This distance exceeds the 

 length of the strewn fields of stony meteorite falls by a factor of 

 nearly 100. 



Foote (1899) mentioned that six pieces of the Tombigbee River 

 meteorite were found in nearly a straight line some 16 km. long, 

 with the heaviest mass to the north. Similarly, the heaviest mete- 

 orite in table 6, the Mt. Joy iron, is located in the northeastern end 

 of the 850-mile ellipse. It is easier to assume that the 6 irons along 

 a line 16 km. long are related as a shower than that all 19 meteorites 

 came as a shower. But if the north and south alignment of the 

 Tombigbee River iron is important, all the 19 meteorites perhaps 

 should be regrouped into smaller clusters, more or less in a north- 

 south direction. 



