548 Dr. Walter Flight — History of Meteorites. 



"middle gravels ") under normal glacial drift, although I have found 

 gravels belonging to all the others so situated. 



In Ireland the resurrectionists have employed very loose evidence 

 to reinstate their "middle gravel," and from what I have seen in 

 some places in England, very similar evidence has been used there 

 also. After the ice and waters of the different seas disappeared 

 from the face of the country, the latter must have been more or less 

 destitute of a protecting envelope of vegetation ; therefore meteoric 

 abrasion had a maximum denuding power, that formed extensive 

 sheets of a re-arranged drift. These accumulations in low places 

 were thick, but gradually thinned as they ascended heights. This 

 process may be seen going on at the present day in the neighbour- 

 hood of Swansea, where the sulphurous fumes ft*om the furnaces 

 have destroyed vegetation, while Agassiz mentions the formation of 

 a similar drift in Brazil. This re-arranged drift in places in Ireland 

 has been made to do duty as " Upper Boulder-clay," and I was 

 shown a similar drift in Lancashire as " Upper Boulder-clay." I 

 am very much afraid that the statement made by the President of 

 Section C. at the late Meeting of the British Association in Bristol is 

 too true ; and that there is no one living capable of writing about the 

 Glacial Period, as our knowledge of it and what probably took place 

 during it is very crude. In the County Dublin there are low and 

 high level gravels and drifts containing marine shells ; and the 

 various writers on the subject, myself among the number, have put- 

 forward more or less vague speculations and theories to account for 

 the difference in their levels ; while none of us ever thought of col- 

 lecting the fossils from the different zones, and seeing if they formed 

 similar groups. If the latter was done, I would not be surprised to 

 hear, the groups had more or less different characters, showing the 

 gravels to be of different ages. 



VII. — A Chapter in the History op Meteorites. 



By Walter Flight, D.Sc, F.G.S., 



Of the Department of Mineralogy, British Museum. 



{Continued from page 504.) 



Found 1861. — Breitenbach, Bohemia. 1 



This remarkable siderolite was found in Bohemia, at a spot not 

 very far distant from the Saxon frontier or indeed from Eittersgrun, 

 in Saxony, where a mass closely resembling it was almost contem- 

 poraneously found. So far back as 1751 at Steinbach, a village 

 about midway between Breitenbach and Eittersgrun, a meteorite in 

 all respects similar was discovered ; the three masses are so similar 

 to one another and so dissimilar to any others preserved in collections 

 that there can be little doubt that they belong to the same fall. In 

 1825 Stromeyer examined a siderolite in which he found 61 - 8 per 

 cent, of silica; this also appears to have been a member of this 



1 N. Story-Maskelyne. Proc. Royal Soc. 1869, xix. 266. — V. von Lang. Sitzber. 

 Ah. Wiss. Wien, 1869, lix. 848. Fogg. Ann. cxxxix. 315.— N. Story-Maskelyne. 

 Phil. Trans. 1871, clxi. 359.— G. vom Rath. Zeit. Deut. Qeol. Gesell. Berlin, 1873, 

 xxv. 106. Pogg. Ann. Erganz.-Bd. vi. 337. Jahrb. Mineralogie, 1874, i. 79. 



