1849.] Miscellaneous, 171 



A supplementary note on Captain Sherwill's Meteoric Iron. By 

 Henry Piddington. 



In my remarks on the remarkable form of this meteorite, I have 

 suggested, p. 545, Journal Nov. 1848, that it might perhaps be owing 

 to its having fallen in a semifluid state as a mass of melted metal, 

 diagonally, on a yielding soil, and that the foot might be thus formed. 

 By a singular piece of good fortune, which rarely indeed occurs to theo- 

 rizers, I am enabled very greatly to add to the probability that this 

 was really the case, by the following parallel instance, in which nature 

 has certainly performed for us the very experiment which I suggested, 

 of projecting a semifused mass of metal on a soft surface. 



In a rich collection of volcanic rocks and minerals from Vesuvius,* 

 presented by T. B. Swinhoe, Esq., there are two of the well known 

 Bombe Volcaniche (volcanic bombs) one of which is a flattened ellip- 

 tical disk about 3f inches long by 3 inches wide, and 1 inch thick, as 

 in the annexed sketch, of which one is the horizontal section and the 

 other a vertical one. 



It will be seen that this may be termed a complete embryo of our 

 Aerolite, though its substance is a common leucitic or pearlstone por- 

 phyry, or cineritious lava. It has on what must (from the position of 

 the centre of gravity) have been the lower part, the rudiments of a 

 foot, of which, as in the meteorite, the axis is about in one of the two 

 centres of the ellipse, and it evidently, from the smoothness of the 

 surface, on which are incrusted grains of hornblende or augite, which 

 are not seen internally, has been in a state of fusion. Now these bodies, 

 we know, must fall vertically, but if they fell on a slope, which this 

 probably did, and in a soft soil of ashes or rapilli, they would be driven 

 forward some distance in a soft state while cooling, as I have supposed 

 our meteo xC iron to have been. 



Our volcanic bomb is cracked through the longer axis of the ellipse, 



and, at the prominence which may represent the foot, it has, as it were, 



burst open, as if some gases had suddenly escaped there. The ends 



are a little fractured, making the foremost one rather truncated, and I 



* But of which I regret to say all the labels are lost ! 



z 2 



