48 Frof. Maskelync and Dr. Lang's Mitwalogical Notes. 



investigations in it, one cannot help feeling some disappointment, 

 as well at the incompleteness of the chemical results that have 

 been hitherto obtained, as at the unsatisfactory position of our 

 knowledge concerning the origin and the sources of meteorites. 

 Aerolitical science has to deal with the circumstances that 

 attend the fall of a meteorite, no less than with its mechanical 

 condition and its chemical composition ; and from the data thus 

 acquired it has to arrive at conclusions regarding the origin, 

 the motion, and the cosmical relations of the foreign matter that 

 thus wanders as it were into the atmosphere of our earth. 



The general literature of the subject is becoming very consider- 

 able. Besides the tables and researches published by Mr. Greg in 

 our own country, and besides many papers of Baron Beichenbach 

 in FoggendorfFs Annalen, Hofrath Haidinger has, by his active 

 pen and energetic mind, contributed, in Austria, perhaps more 

 valuable notices on the fall of meteorites than all other living 

 authors ; and Dr. Laurence Smith, as well as Frof. Silliman, by 

 their accurate collection of facts and by their own investigations 

 as chemists, have done much for the subject in America, where 

 also the vigilant activity of Frof. Shepard has been conspicuous 

 in collecting and distributing the specimens themselves. 



The more special and exact literature, that, namely, which 

 details the work done on meteorites in the laboratory, carries 

 the names of the best inorganic analysts of this century, inclu- 

 ding those of Bose, Wohler, and Bammelsberg. But if the pro- 

 gress thus far made in either the general or the special parts of the 

 subject is not very large, it is at any rate enough to convince 

 us that we see with tolerable clearness the questions to which we 

 have to seek answers, and what are the cardinal points of interest 

 raised by the presence of a meteorite on our globe, and by the 

 circumstances attending its advent to it. 



The chemical methods adopted for the analysis of a meteorite 

 are probably unsatisfactory to every chemist who has employed 

 them. The separation of the olivinoid and soluble felspathic from 

 the insoluble felspathic, augitic, and other constituents, by the 

 action of an acid, is necessarily incomplete; and the assignment of 

 even empirical formulse for the augitoid and felspathic ingredients 

 is no less unsatisfactory. Yet in many meteorites it seems very 

 difficult to conceive any better direct mode of operation. The 

 intimate manner in which the different minerals are sometimes 

 mingled, in what I may call a microscopic breccia, building the 

 structure of the minute spherules in some of those belonging to 

 the large group to which G. Bose has given the happy name of 

 chondritic meteorites, and the excessive subdivision of the nickel- 

 iron which in infinitesimal spangles is disseminated alike through 

 homogeneous spherules and through those which present this 



