626 OLIVER C. FARRINGTON 



quantity of known stony meteoritic matter. Glass is known to 

 indicate rapid cooling. Further, the character of the chondri 

 themselves is such as to lead many students of the subject, 

 notably Brezina and Wadsworth, to believe that they are the 

 result of rapid and arrested crystallization. The fact that 

 chrysolite, the least fusible and therefore the earliest cooling 

 mineral, forms the most chondri, lends support to this view. It 

 must be confessed that the real origin of chondri is as yet very 

 obscure and the theory above suggested is far from accounting 

 for many of their peculiarities. Yet the facts above noted seem 

 to me to argue more strongly in favor of a rapid cooling of the 

 substance found in such meteorites than a slow one. 



If the arguments in favor of the above statements seem 

 sustained, then the conclusion to which they appear to me to 

 point is the following : Meteorites are portions of a disrupted mass of 

 cosmic 77tatter which had a spheroidal form., increased in density 

 toivard the ce?iter, and cooled from a liquid or semi-liquid to a solid 

 state before disruption. 



The application of this hypothesis to the subject in hand 

 may perhaps best be traced by applying it in a reverse order. 

 Given a defined quantity of liquid or semi-liquid. It will take 

 the form of a spheroid, since this is the only form known in 

 which a liquid mass would maintain itself in space. Its mate- 

 rials would arrange themselves according to density. The iron, 

 for example, would sink to the center, and the slag-like silicates 

 rise to the surface, as they may daily be seen to do in a blast 

 furnace, or as a centrifugal separator assorts substances accord- 

 ing to density. The exterior of the sphere owing to contact 

 with the cold of space would be cooled with comparative sud- 

 denness, giving the minerals of the surface a glassy, brittle 

 character. The protected interior would cool more slowly, giv- 

 ing the molecules of the metallic center an opportunity to 

 arrange themselves in an orderly, crystalline fashion. In 

 time, however, the globe becomes solidified from center to 

 circumference. During the process of solidification, and later, 

 many processes of disruption and adjustment go on as the 



