H. A . Ward — Veramin Meteorite. 453 



Art. XLTX. — The Veramin Meteorite ; by Henry A. Ward. 



This most interesting Oriental meteorite, which fell in 

 northern Persia in 1880, was first made known in Europe by 

 Fred. Dietsch, a German mining engineer, who gave a short 

 account of it on page 100 of vol. xl of the Berg and Hiitten- 

 mannische Zeitung, March 18, 1881. His notice was based 

 upon information given him personally by the Shah, who 

 handed him, in confirmation of his words, a fragment of the 

 stone weighing 400 grams. Subsequently Baron Emil Godel- 

 Lannoy, secretary of the Austrian legation of Teheran, 

 brought two small pieces of the stone to Yienna. One piece, 

 weighing 28 grams, he presented to Baron von Braun ; the 

 other, weighing 28 grams, he gave to his friend Dr. Aristid 

 Brezina, who incorporated it in the great meteorite and min- 

 eral collection of the Royal Museum, of which collection he 

 was then the director. Brezina described this in a paper 

 before the K. Akademie der Wissenschaf ten in July, 1881, giv- 

 ing in few. words the mineral composition of the fragment 

 with its petrographical characters ; but the material' was too 

 scanty for a full analysis, and nothing was known about the 

 main mass beyond the fact inexactly reported, that its weight 

 was 45 kilograms, and that it was preserved in the palace of 

 the Shah. So matters remained with Veramin — thus the 

 stone had been called — until the autumn of 1898. At that 

 time I was in Stockholm, where I saw a small fragment of 

 the stone in the hands of Baron Nordenskiold, who informed 

 me that it had been brought to him from Teheran by a 

 returned Swedish servant (barber) of the Shah. As I had 

 long projected a visit to Persia, and as Veramin had come to 

 have strong attractions for me, I decided that I would at once 

 undertake the long trip. A week later, at St. Petersburg, I 

 obtained through the good offices of our legation an introduc- 

 tion to the Persian ambassador in that capital. That gentle- 

 man, Gen. Mirzah Riza Khan, interested himself in my 

 intentions, and gave me several letters to officers of the Shah's 

 court, among them one to Muskah-es-Sultanneh, the Grand 

 Vizier. After first crossing Pussia and the Caucasus range to 

 Tiflis in the Transcaucasus, and eastward to Baku on the 

 Caspian, I took steamer down that sea to Enzeli, the port of 

 northern Persia ; thence eight days of horseback and two of 

 carriage brought me to Teheran. 



After a few days in this city I obtained audience with the 

 Grand Vizier at his private palace. He spoke and understood 

 French, so I told him in simple, unvarnished words the object 



