of the Farmington Meteorite 61 



best known. The fact has already been urged by Tsehermak* 

 as proof that Reichenbach's view that the black veins of 

 meteorites are formed by the flowing of fused material of the 

 crust into fissures, cannot be correct, and he notes that in the 

 Chantonnay meteorite the fused matter of the crust only pene- 

 trated the fissures to a depth of 6 min even though they were 

 open some distance beyond this. Moreover the Farmington 

 meteorite was not hot when dug up four hours after its fall.f 

 The veins of other sections of the Farmington meteorite have 

 less the appearance of leading in from the surface than those 

 figured by Preston. In a section now in the Field Columbian 

 Museum collection, shown in fig. 1, two veins cross one another 

 nearly at right angles. One of these is continuous at intervals 



Farmington meteorite, natural size. 



for a length of 90 ram . It is hard to conceive of such a system 

 of fissures as this filling from the surface. 



That the nickel-iron of the Farmington meteorite is more 

 difficultly fusible than the stony constituents is proved by the 

 fact that the former stands out in many places over the sur- 

 face in prominent rounded beads. If any material had flowed 

 into the fissures, therefore, it would probably have been fused 

 silicates. If then the above theory of the origin of the 

 metallic veins cannot be accepted, what is their nature? They 

 do not appear to be of the nature of the harnischflachen of 

 the Honolulu, Mocs, Pultusk and other meteorites, which 

 when seen in cross section look like metallic veins but when 

 cleft along the vein are plainly seen to be slickensided surfaces 

 over which movement has flattened and drawn out the metallic 

 grains. In the view of the present writer the veins of the 

 Farmington meteorite are phases of structure of the metallic 

 constituents of the mass. It is well known that the structure 



*Sitzb. Wien. Akad., 1874, lxx, p. 467. 

 f Science, vol. xvi, p. 39. 



