Maech 18, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



417 



evidence, and was more impressed by the fact 

 that the disturbance of the ground at the 

 point of impact was not as great as I should 

 have anticipated. So far, the evidence, though 

 puzzling, seemed too strong to be summarily 

 rejected. 



A diligent search of the surroundings and 

 an excavation which I made at the supposed 

 point of impact to a depth below all previous 

 disturbance, had failed to reveal any other 

 stone of a meteoritie nature. The composi- 

 tion of the specimen was quite different from 

 that of neighboring dike rocks, and was abso- 

 lutely unlike the vast majority of granite, 

 diorite, and dark, banded, or concretionary 

 felsitic boulders of the local glacial drift. The 

 surfacing was such as a water-worn boulder of 

 its composition might receive, if it had lain 

 for a long time in a peat bog, where the fine- 

 grained ground-mass could be disintegrated, 

 leaving the phenocrysts protruding. The ac- 

 tual site, however, was not of this description, 

 but was on the sloping border of a dissected 

 sand-plain, some twenty to thirty feet above 

 the neighboring valley. 



Now for the real facts : It appears that 

 the proprietor of a cheap vaudeville show 

 in Boston, purchased the " meteorite " from 

 a Vermont man. It was said to have " fallen " 

 in New Hampshire. The new owner seems to 

 have thought it necessary to work the thing 

 up and give it " local color." Accordingly, 

 the stone (previously heated?) was taken to 

 Norwood in an automobile, by night, and de- 

 posited on the farm of Mr. Nickerson, who 

 was in the secret. I have talked with one of 

 the employees of the dime-museum, who con- 

 fessed that he was the man who broke the bars 

 in the night. The next morning, Mr. Nick- 

 erson made an errand for one of the farm 

 hands to the pasture (to hunt up a stray 

 cow, or some such thing), the errand being 

 so arranged that the man could not help find- 

 ing the broken bars. On receiving the report of 

 the occurrence, the farmer was apparently the 

 most surprised man in town. Close question- 

 ing could not trip him. 



I have been unable to ascertain how or when 

 the stone was heated, nor do I know the secret 



of the fire-ball; but I suggest that the lumi- 

 nous appearance may have been produced in 

 the following way: A large inverted rocket 

 of suitable make, suspended from a (captive?) 

 balloon, may have been sent up to a height of 

 something over a mile, being provided with a 

 time-fuse which burst the balloon and started 

 the rocket downward at the same time. The 

 farmer, in giving his version said : " My first 

 idea was that the stone had been dropped 

 from a balloon," showing that his mind was 

 running on balloons. A vague story, insuffi- 

 ciently corroborated, has reached me, which 

 implies that a similar bright object was seen 

 in the same direction about four hours later 

 on the same night, which possibly signifies that 

 the rocket scheme was worked twice in order 

 to make sure that the light should be seen by 

 somebody not in the business, and whose 

 testimony could not be impeached. 



A few words in regard to the petrographical 

 examination of the stone may be in order, 

 since they may lead to an identification of the 

 locality of an interesting specimen. It has 

 every appearance of having been originally 

 derived from an ancient terrestrial igneous 

 rock which has been metamorphosed to some 

 extent by hot mineral waters under heavy 

 pressure, but shows little evidence of the ac- 

 tion of mountain-building forces. Micro- 

 scopic examination of a thin section shows 

 that the material consists largely of labradorite 

 feldspar arranged in ophitic structure. The 

 clear greenish-white crystals appear entirely 

 transparent in section, except for some trifling 

 inclusions, namely, a few very minute crystals 

 of yellow muscovite (sericite), and some irreg- 

 ular masses of pale brownish-yellow, lime- 

 alumina garnet (grossularite). The corners 

 of the feldspar crystals are mostly quite sharp, 

 but a few are well rounded, as if they had 

 suffered considerable attrition in the original 

 magmatic flow. There are a few transverse 

 fractures, but hardly any displacement. The 

 edges of several crystals have been meta- 

 morphosed to albite. A measurement of the 

 extinction angle on center and margin gives 

 me: Lab.-Alb. = — 47° 55', in which, assum- 

 ing an uncorrected albite angle of + 18°, there 



