Ti9. 



Prof. Maskelyne and Dr. Lang's Miner alogical Notes. 



villagers, he states that they were startled by three loud reports 

 succeeded by a rumbling sound which gradually died away. 

 Their attention was immediately arrested by a cloud of smoke, 

 which rose from the ground at about 1000 yards from them. 

 They saw nothing like a falling body, but they heard a whistling 

 sound as of a bullet, but much louder. They went to the spot 

 and found the stone, round which the gravel had been thrown 

 up for some 2 feet. Fortunately the stone was not carried away, 

 for nobody touched it for two days. It was Mahadeo ! 



Two hours after the fall, the serenity of the weather was in- 

 terrupted by a storm accompanied by a little rain. 



The reports of the explosion were heard at a distance of 

 sixty miles from the locality. 



Dr. Oldham, on sending these most interesting aerolites to, 

 England, accompanied them by remarkable observations of his 

 own. The two little Bulloah fragments fit exactly together, 

 and both fit on to the Piprassi stone. The Chireya stone in like 

 manner fits with sufficient precision to that which fell at Qutahar. 

 He surmised also that a careful adjustment would succeed in 

 uniting all five fragments into a whole ; and he indicated as a 

 guide to this adjustment, a remarkable vein of iron which ran 

 through the Piprassi and the Qutahar stones. I have since tried 

 every possible means of effecting this; and though it is not 

 practicable to find continuous surfaces of contact on the Piprassi 

 and Qutahar stones, I have been enabled to determine the 

 precise position they must have occupied relatively to each other, 

 and have modelled and constructed an intermediate piece which, 

 allowing contact of the stones at one part, builds the whole of 

 the fragments into one large shell-like piece, obviously itself a 

 fragment of some far larger mass. But this presents also another 

 point of great interest. The Bulloah and the Piprassi stones, at 

 the contact surfaces by which they fit together, exhibit no crust, 

 though in other respects coated with it. The Chireya and 

 Qutahar fragments, on the other hand, present a crust hardly, if 

 at all, distinguishable from that covering the rest of their mass, 

 on the very parts that form the faces of junction, and at which, 

 they fit with unquestionable precision. These surfaces indeed 

 are smooth, and the edges very much rounded off, while those 

 of the Bulloah and Piprassi stones fit together with the exactitude 

 of adjustment with which the portions of a broken piece of oolite 

 might be reunited. 



Before attempting to draw conclusions from these facts, T will 



describe the general characters of the several fragments, in order 



that all the data offered by this aerolitic fall may be given in 



consecutive order. 



The two that have been preserved out of the five stones that 



