282 A. LIVERSIDGE. 



bling gold but soluble in nitric acid, these may have been 

 copper or brass, (as copper is almost invariably present in 

 meteorites it may have had a meteoric origin); the Men- 

 indie dust also contained a yellow metal soluble in nitric 

 acid. The dust from Gundagai yielded a yellow malleable 

 metallic spangles insoluble in nitric acid, and therefore 

 presumably gold. 



In most cases some of the metallic spangles were visible 

 without a lens, these were separated from the rest of the 

 material left in the mortar by picking them up on the 

 point of a needle and transferring them to a slide for 

 examination under the microscope; under a one inch 

 objective, they still looked like gold, the action of the 

 nitric acid was also watched in the same way; some of the 

 soluble ones were seen to dissolve slowly, others quickly 

 with many minute gas bubbles. 



The gold and platinum may or may not be of meteoric 

 origin, but as both metals have been met with in meteor- 

 ites, (an account of the occurrence of gold in meteorites 

 will be given in a subsequent paper) and platinum has 

 apparently been previously found in meteorites, 1 it is not 

 impossible that both the gold and the platinum metal may 

 have had a cosmic source, although it is much more prob- 

 able that the gold has been windborne from some auriferous 

 area, for even the sandstone and shales about Sydney contain 

 traces of gold. 2 



Conclusion. 



I have quoted what may be considered by some as an 

 unnecessarily large number of accounts of meteoric dusts, 

 dust storms, rains of mud, dry fogs, etc., but I do so because 

 some of the explanations given by different observers do 



1 Davidson, Am. Journ. Sci., 1898. Mingaye, Eeport of the Dept. of 

 Mines, Sydney, 1898, p. 21. 



2 A. Liversidge— Journ. Roy. Soc. N.S.W., 1894, pp. 185 - 188. 



