SCIENCE. 



275 



FOSSIL ORGANISMS IN METEORITES* 

 By Geo. W. Rachel. 



Dr. Hahfi's work, of which " SCIENCE " gave a short 

 notice in its last issue, promises to revolutionize many 

 views which have heretofore been believed to be firmly 

 and irrevocably established. It is not at all necessary to 

 accept all the conclusions and agree with all the various 

 lines of reasoning, into which the author has been led by 

 his results, but nobody will fail to perceive the portentous 

 meaning of the results with which his untiring efforts in 

 this important matter have been rewarded. 



There has been formerly a manifest tendency to belittle 

 small things and apparently insignificant phenomena, and 

 bestow the greatest attention on those matters which im- 

 press the observer by their magnitude. Modern science 

 has done away considerably with this erroneous method 

 and has taught us that it is the little things which achieve 

 great results in nature, as a rule. To this class of phe- 

 nomena, which has been habitually underrated until a 

 comparatively recent time, belong the meteorites, shooting 

 stars and meteoric dust generally. Chladni's view that 

 they fall from the skies, pronounced in 1795, was ridiculed 

 by the learned men of the times. One member of a com- 

 mittee sent by the French Academy to investigate the fall 

 of a meteorite in the neighborhood of L'Aigle, Le Luc, 

 declared that he would really be forced to believe what 

 the people who witnessed the fall said, if he did not know 

 that such a thing was utterly impossible. 



It was not long, however, until the celestial origin of 

 these bodies was universally recognized, several other 

 falls of large meteorites occurring during the first decade 

 of the present century, which could no longer be explained 

 away. After this various stones that were known to have 

 fallen upon the earth were examined and described, and a 

 good many more which were recognized to be of celestial 

 origin. The number of all the various specimens thus 

 investigated has gradually become very large. Kessel- 

 mayer, in his great work on the subject, describes 647 

 distinct falls. 



It is not now necessary to recall' the several results 

 of these investigations, nor to describe the peculiar 

 properties of meteorites on which the resemblances and 

 differences between those celestial minerals and our ter- 

 restial rocks are based. Suffice it to state that between 

 the two types which have been recognized, viz : those 

 consisting exclusively of iron, and those which are com- 

 posed of certain silicious minerals, such as Au^ite, 

 Bronzite, Olivine, Anorthite and other Feldspars, there 

 are all th° possible combinations of both ; the ferrous 

 meteorites predomina'e, however, those with a consider- 

 able percentage of silicious constituents being compara- 

 tively rare, and the purely silicious still more so. 



It is the latter, the silicious material, which has been 

 examined with such remarkable results by Dr. Hahn. 

 This occurs usually in light-colored spherical or pear- 

 shaped masses (x<""^p°' 1 ) similar to the nests of crystals 

 (druses) which are a well-known occurrence in crystal- 

 line rocks. These peculiar forms consist principally of 

 Bronzite and Enstatite, which to the naked eye show an 

 appearance graphically described by Kesselmayer twenty 

 years ago . 



Prof. Giimbel, of Munich, in a report made to the 

 Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences has described 

 them, on the basis of Kesselmayer's book and his own 

 researches, as follows : 



" Longitudinal sections show columns and fibres, com- 

 posed of small polyhedra, which in cross sections look 

 like irregular polygons. These polygons often show a 

 sort of radiating arrangement in their interior, issuing 

 from what appears to be an ill-defined nucleus ; this nu- 



* Hahn, O. Die Meteorite (Chondrite) and ihre Organismen ; Laupp ; 

 Tubingen^ 1881, with 32 photolithographic plates. 



cleus seems to have been changing its place gradually, 

 for the radii show an irregularity such as would be pro- 

 duced by such change ot site. The fibres, for that is 

 what these structures look like, are not of equal size 

 throughout, but taper off into points and occasionally 

 even send off branches. This is especially visible in 

 cross-sections where one set is apparently replaced by 

 others, these in turn by others, and so on. All the fibres 

 consist, as has been stated, of_a light centre, and a dark 

 enclosing substance." 



This description was given in 1878, and it certainly 

 reads like what Hahn has proved it to be : fossil organ- 

 isms I 



This successful amateur, for such he was before he 

 succeeded in gaining his present reputation by his partici- 

 pation in the debate on the "Eozb'on canadensc," and then 

 resigned his government position to pursue this peculiar 

 line of research at his leisure — this " Gerichts-Referen- 

 darius, a D." has by an ingenious application of the 

 comparatively new method of making transparent sec- 

 tions of these meteorites accomplished results of which 

 many a specialist might be proud. In order to exclude 

 the error to which human vision and draughtsmanship 

 might be liable, he has prepared photographic reproduc- 

 tions of his specimens, and on 32 excellent plates he pre- 

 sents the scientific world with 142 of these highly inter- 

 esting preparations. Most of the fossil structures thus 

 revealed belong to the animal world, indeed, Hahn him- 

 self professes that he is unable to find evidences of veg- 

 etable organisms ; these, however, since the appearance 

 of his work in February, have been recognized by Prof. 

 Karsten, of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in sections pre- 

 pared by him from a portion of the very meteorite in his 

 possession which has furnished a considerable number 

 of Hahn's specimens. Two of these Prof. Karsten has 

 drawn, and the cuts are published in an exhaustive 

 paper on Hahn's book, together with his own observa- 

 tions and those of others on this very subject in the Ger- 

 man Journal "Die Natur," edited by Mr. Karl Mueller, 

 of Halle, Prussia. 



As to the genuineness of Dr. Hahn's discovery there 

 can be no possible doubt, and it has been generally ad- 

 mitted — reluctantly by some, it is true — that these 

 " Chondrites" consist almost exclusively of fossil organ- 

 isms. Dr. D. F. Weinland, a member of the Academy of 

 Sciences, of Philadelphia, where he formerly resided, has 

 also published a review of Hahn's book in the " Aus- 

 land," edited by Friedrich Von Hellwald, of Tubingen, 

 Wurtemberg, in which he states that by the kindness of 

 the author he has had the opportunity of examining 

 these specimens, and although this examination has not 

 given exactly the same results in regard to the determin- 

 ation of the particular kind of organism, he cheerfully 

 admits that they are organisms, and this fact will not be 

 doubted by any one who scans the plates published by 

 Dr. Hahn. 



In a postscript to this review, Dr. Weinland informs 

 the reader that the author has entrusted to him the diffi- 

 cult task of classifying all the fossil organisms in more 

 than three hundred of his specimens— of which Hahn 

 has prepared over six hundred — and Dr. Weinland who is 

 a competent naturalist, gives a few of his preliminary re- 

 sults. He compares the material which these sections 

 display to the detritus of which the youngest coral lime 

 and sandstone (coralline crag) consist such as is found 

 on the shores of the Mexican Gulf. He furthermore 

 states that complete forms are rarely found, but that the 

 material is sufficiently abundant to construct many com- 

 plete species, in the manner usually applied to fossil re- 

 mains. 



The number of the various species of polypi, crinoids, 

 spongia; and algia; which are united by a silicious mater- 

 ial, Dr. Weinland estimates after a cursory examination 

 at about fifty. 



One of the corals is set down by various observers as 



