62 Dr. Waiter Flight—On Meteorites. 
This is evidently an alloy of very well defined composition, which 
has been extruded from the nickel-iron under special conditions 
when the latter was saturated with it and ready to expelit. It is 
the constituent of nickel-iron which forms the fine lines constituting 
the Wiedmannstiadtian figure, and not schreibersite, as usually stated 
in writings on the etched figures of meteoric iron. 'Tanite is the 
name Professor Gustav Rose gave to leaves containing 13:2 per cent. 
of nickel, and which he stated to form the figures on an etched sur- 
face. Dr. K. G. Zimmermann, in a letter to one of the editors of 
the Jahrbuch fiir Mineralogie, 1861, p. 557, proposed the name 
“‘meteorine”’ for a new metal occurring in the Cranbourne meteorite 
which he found to contain no copper, nickel, or cobalt. The sub- 
stance referred to in both cases was evidently the little plates above 
described. As the composition of this mineral has now for the first 
time been definitely made out, I propose to call it Edmondsonite, in 
memory of the late George Edmondson, the Head Master of Queen- 
wood College, Hampshire, a great lover of science, a man with 
whom [ had the honour to be long and intimately connected. 
A curious accident should here be described which established the 
fact that the alloy is a definite chemical compound. A number of 
pieces of nickel-iron from this meteorite, which had become rusty, 
were heated in a porcelain tube in a current of hydrogen. During 
the experiment, which was conducted out of doors, it came on to rain, 
and some drops touched the hot tube and cracked it. Air slowly 
entered the crack and oxidised the iron, till it acquired a bright blue 
colour; while the little plate of edmondsonite remained colourless. 
This result accords with the conclusion arrived at by Stodart and 
Faraday some sixty years ago,’ on the oxidation of alloys of iron 
and nickel. An alloy of iron, or rather of the best Bombay wootz, 
with 10 per cent. of nickel, made by them in 1820. in imitation of 
the Siberian meteoric iron, in which Children found as a mean of 
three analyses 8:96 per cent.” of nickel, was compared, as regards 
its powers of undergoing oxidation, with pure iron. And the 
authors say: ‘The colour, when polished, had a yellow tinge. A 
piece of the alloy has been exposed to moist air for a considerable 
time together with a piece of pure iron; they are both a little rusty, 
not, however, to the same extent, that with the nickel being but 
slightly acted upon comparatively to the action on the pure iron; 
it thus appears that nickel, when combined with iron, has some 
effect in preventing oxidation, though certainly not to the extent 
that has at times been attributed to it. It is a curious fact that the 
same quantity of the nickel alloyed with steel instead of preventing 
its rusting, appeared to accelerate it very rapidly.” 
The Bruce meteorite contains many nodules of troilite lying here 
and there amongst the plates and crystals of nickel-iron, always in 
rounded masses, only very occasionally an ill-defined cleavage plane 
1 Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics. Taylor and 
Francis, 1859, p. 63. 
* Berzelius found nickel 10°73 per cent., and copper 0°46 per cent. in the Krasno- 
jarsk nickel-iron from Siberia. 
