K K Howell — Cross Roads Meteorite. 67 



Aet. X. — Cross Roads Meteorite; by Edwin E. Howell. 



Last September I purchased from Mr. B. E. Barnes of 

 Boyett, N. C. (who secured it of the finder about three weeks 

 after it fell), a small aerolite which is here figured. It fell in 

 the early morning about five o'clock, May 24th, 1892, in the 

 township of Cross Koads, Wilson Co., K C, and was seen by 



• a young man named Gray 

 Bass, who was only about two 

 hundred feet distant. He 

 seems to have been fright- 

 ened by the sight and sound 

 and waited two or three hours 

 before going to the spot. 

 With a stick he then dug up 

 the meteorite, which pene- 

 trated 4 or 5 inches into the 

 packed but sodded earth close 

 by a road bed. Young Bass 

 also states that some of the grass near the spot was dead and 

 looked as if killed by fire ! He further says that he thought the 

 meteorite came from the northwest. From the testimony of 

 others who heard it, however, it seems undoubtedly to have 

 come from exactly the opposite direction, having been heard as 

 far away as eighteen miles in a S. E. direction. Among those 

 who heard it was a colored boy one quarter of a mile to the 

 S. E., Mieajoh Hales, four to six miles to the S. E. who describes 

 the noise as "somewhat like thunder accompanied by lesser 

 sounds like the report of pistols or the snapping of burning 

 reeds." Another man, Edward S. Dees, distant five or six miles 

 nearly south, wrote in answer to my inquiries, that one clear 

 morning before sunrise sometime in May he was in the open 

 field and heard a peculiar noise which lasted a quarter of a min- 

 ute and sounded like "a freight train crossing a trellis" — 

 thought it came from the S. W. Wm. B. Scott, about eighteen 

 miles to the S. E., writes that before sunrise on the 24th of May 

 he and a neighbor heard a noise " something like a sky rocket 

 but more like thunder which went off in a northern direction." 

 Mr. Barnes sent the stone first to the National Museum and 

 a fragment weighing 4^ grams was broken off. With the ex- 

 ception of this piece nothing has been taken from it since it was 

 picked up ; several small chips however were broken off before 

 it reached the ground and the broken surface partly crusted 

 again. It now weighs 157 grams and it would probably have 

 weighed about 200 grams, if it had reached the earth unbroken. 

 The thick even crust coating the meteorite indicates that it 

 was a complete individual and not one of a shower. The 

 freshly broken surface is of the usual gray color and the struc- 

 ture is chondritic. The dimensions of the stone are 1, 2 and 2J 

 inches. The specific gravity is 3 67, which is somewhat greater 

 than most meteorites of this class, indicating a little more iron. 



Washington, June 13, 1893. 



