Dr. Walter Flight— On Meteorites. 311 



furnish such a volume of water as would fill the wide valleys from 

 one limit to the other. If, on the other hand, the rivers, as they 

 are, scooped out the valleys by a continuous process of denudation, 

 we are landed on the horns of a dilemma. In the first place, they 

 are not now destructive of their beds, but conservative ; and suppose 

 we could postulate the contradictory postulate, that a conservative 

 river would become destructive when flowing at a higher level, 

 we cannot conceive how a river which has scooped out a furrow 

 in a wide valley through which it flows can break through its 

 banks, and cut another furrow elsewhere, until it has ploughed the 

 whole valley. Rivers that change their channels are those which, 

 like the Yellow River, deposit largely in their own beds, and raise 

 themselves above the level of the surrounding country. Those 

 which run in a furrow cannot overleap their own channels. 



In the forty-fifth volume of Silliman's Journal, second series, is a 

 valuable paper by Dr. E, Andrews, of Chicago, on the deposits in the 

 Somme valley, etc. Although I cannot agree in the use he makes 

 of ice in explaining these deposits, I am anxious to quote the 

 following paragraph, as stating the case well against those who 

 urge that the river terraces are merely the fringes of a former 

 continuous deposit. He says : " The valley of the Somme is over 

 a mile and a half at the top, while the present river does not 

 appear to exceed fifty feet in breadth. It is safe to say that the 

 present stream, spread over the whole valley, would not be half an 

 inch deep, and, making all probable allowance for spring floods, it 

 is wholly inadequate to the production of gravel beds containing 

 pebbles larger than a man's head, and boulders weighing a ton. 

 This valley presents none of the characteristics of those which are 

 widened by the meandering of a shifting narrow stream, now 

 widening this bank and now that. It is broad, level floored, and 

 parallel banked" (op. cit. p. 184). In every way the problem is 

 viewed Sir Charles Lyell's solution of its difficulties seems to fail. 



We have reached this point, therefore, that the valley terraces 

 are not the debris of denudation left by the present rivers, either in 

 carving out the present valleys from their original matrix, or in 

 recarving them after they had, as Lyell and others suppose, and as 

 we believe without due warrant, been refilled with soft deposits. 

 (To be continued.) 



IV. — Supplement to a Chapter in the History of Meteorites. 

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



[Continued from p. 219.) 



1877, December 26th, 8 a.m.— Between Hohr and Ballendar, near 



Coblentz. 



K correspondent of the "Coblenzer Zeitung," dating from " Hohr, 

 27th December," writes that on the. preceding day two meteorites fell 

 near the road leading to the former frontier, in the direction of Bal- 

 lendar, and that the fall was attended by a very characteristic explo- 

 sion. The editor of the above journal has been unable to gather any 



