396 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 401. 



In his great work on 'La Nouvelle Espagne,' 

 published in 1811, Humboldt described in a 

 broad and philosophical way the great field of 

 the Toluca Irons, and the size of some isolated 

 masses in the States of Zacatecas and Duran- 

 go. From that day imtil this naturalists and 

 travelers in Mexico have examined and de- 

 scribed this product of the country, comment- 

 ing particularly upon their frequence and 

 their size. Their frequence has been greatly 

 overestimated. The total number credited to 

 the Eepublic in Castillo's catalogue of 1889, 

 was 27. To-day we know there are 32 distinct 

 localities, omitting the several points em- 

 braced in two or three widespread showers. 



Other areas of the same size as this Mexi- 

 can belt in the United States and in India, 

 give respectively 67 and 48 falls. 



The preeminence of the Mexican meteorites 

 is the vast size of many of them. In this mat- 

 ter of bulk they are unapproachable. Taking 

 ten of the largest, we find their average weight 

 to be 9 1/10 tons. This as against 8 1/3 cwt. as 

 the average weight of the ten largest American 

 meteorites. 



The Mexican Government has taken an act- 

 ive and enlightened part in the protection of 

 its meteorites. Twelve years ago it expended 

 the sum of $10,000 in bringing five of the larg- 

 est of these to the capital, where they are 

 moimted on huge iron pillars in the entrance 

 court of the School of Mines. 



The largest Mexican iron and one of the 

 two largest meteorites in the world is in the 

 State of Sinaloa, far in the northwestern por- 

 tion of the Eepublic. This was first brought to 

 the notice of the scientific world by Senor 

 Marino Barcena, the noted Mexican astrono- 

 mer, in 1876. In a ten-line notice of it to the 

 Philadelphia Academy of Science, he says, ' I 

 can assure the Academy that its length is more 

 than twelve feet.' Castillo repeats this re- 

 ported measure, adding its breadth as 2 me- 

 ters, and its thickness as 1.50 meters. Brezina, 

 Cohen and Wiilfing speak of it as weighing 

 50 tons and as being the largest meteorite in 

 the world. But in all this there was no defi- 

 nite description of the mass, and no one who 

 mentioned it claimed to have seen it. We 

 were anxious to ascertain about all this, to 



find out the facts among many rumors. The 

 Mexican savants were all interested in having 

 this great celestial body investigated. 



Through Senor Jose C. Aguilera, the Direct- 

 or of the Instituto Geologico, we obtained 

 from the Minister of State letters to the Gov- 

 ernor of Sinaloa and to the Director of Mines 

 in that State. Western Sinaloa is practically 

 impossible to reach in a direct line from the 

 capital. The northern route through Arizona 

 and Sonora involved a journey of over 2,000 

 miles. We took the shorter but harder route 

 across the Cordilleras to the port of Manzanillo 

 on the Pacific, and thence by steamer up the 

 coast of the Gulf of California. There at 

 the adjacent city of Culiacan we took a car- 

 riage with a four-mule team and an American 

 photographer who accompanied us with his 

 camera. A drive of 95 miles to the north and 

 west took us in three days far up among the 

 foothills of the Sierra Madre. Bacubirito is 

 a small but very old mining town, situated on 

 the road to Sinaloa in latitude 26°, and in west 

 longitude 107°. The elevation above sea level 

 is some 2,000 feet. The meteorite is seven 

 miles nearly due south from there, near the 

 hamlet called Palmar de la Sepulveda. Here 

 we found it on a farm called Eanchito, which 

 fills a narrow mountain valley between two 

 spurs of the main range. It was there struck 

 by the plow of Crescendo Aguilar in the simi- 

 mer of 1871. He soon uncovered enough of 

 its bright surface to satisfy himself that he 

 had found a silver mine! Its surrounding is 

 now a cornfield with a black vegetable soil of 

 some two yards in thickness. In this soil we 

 foimd the great meteorite deeply imbedded. 

 Its surface was but a little below the surface 

 of the ground, but with one end slightly pro- 

 jecting above the level. It was a long, mon- 

 strous bowlder of black iron, which seemed to 

 be still burrowing to hide itself from the up- 

 per world. Its surface form was something 

 like that of a great ham. We could walk for 

 many feet along and across its surface, survey- 

 ing these dimensions, but knowing nothing of 

 how far the mass penetrated the soil beneath. 

 Our first work was excavation. We soon got 

 twenty-eight able-bodied persons for this. We 

 imdertook a^ area of thirty feet on a side. 



