ON THE SO-CALLED NORWOOD " METEORITE " 



The issue of Science for January 28 con- 

 tains an article by Professor Frank W. Very 

 entitled "Fall of a Meteorite in Norwood, 

 Massachusetts," descriptive of what he 'sup- 

 poses to have been a meteoritic stone said to 

 have fallen on the farm of Mr. W. P. Nicker- 

 son, of Norwood, Mass., during the nig-ht be- 

 tween October 7-8, 1909. On account of the 

 specific character of the description and for 

 fear that this may be successful in giving the 

 "Norwood meteorite" a place in the litera- 

 ture, I feci that another opinion with regard 

 to the character of the specimen should be 

 placed on record. 



I saw the newspaper account of this fall 

 directly after its occurrence, and after cor- 

 respondence with Mr. Nickerson took the first 

 opportunity that presented itself to examine 

 the specimen, which was then on exhibition 

 m a " dime museum " in Boston. Mr. Nick- 

 erson himself met me there and showed me the 

 stone. Professor Very's account of the ap- 

 pearance of the mass is sufliciently accurate, 

 but his interpretation of it is entirely errone- 

 ous. As a matter of fact, the specimen is a 

 characteristic glacial bowlder of a basic igne- 

 ous dike rock, the matrix in which has been 

 weathered so as to leave the characteristic 

 large phenocrysts of plagioclase projecting 

 from the surface. There is no surface indica- 

 tion whatever of flowage or of the skin which 

 IS characteristic of freshly fallen stony 

 meteorites. I broke off a piece of the stone 

 and examined the fresh fracture with the 

 greatest care under a hand lens without find- 

 ing any indication of the existence of metallic 

 iron in the mass. Since reading Professor 

 Verys article, I have had a thin section of 

 my fragment made. Microscopic examination 

 of this proves the rock to be ordinary labra- 

 dorite-porphyry-a diagnosis which has been 

 confirmed by Dr. H. S. Washington, who has 

 called my attention to his description of this 

 rock type from Essex County, Mass.^ 



Mr. Nickerson told me about the broken 

 bars of the gateway under which the mass was 

 ' Journal of Geology, Vol. 7, p. 290, 1899. 



February 25, 1910] 



SGIE 



found and the other circumstances as related 

 by Professor Very, but he added a statement 

 with regard to a bright flash of light which he 

 had noticed in the sliy during the evening of 

 October 7. His description, however, was 

 only that of an unusually brilliant shooting 

 star. A meteorite of the size of this specimen 

 would surely have illuminated the region 

 over many square miles with almost the light 

 of day, judging from the reports of known 

 meteorites which have been seen to fall, but 

 no such occurrence was reported from Nor- 

 wood. If the falling of a meteorite was the 

 cause of the broken bars, the mass has not 

 yet been found, or at any rate it was other 

 than the specimen described by Professor 

 Very and seen by me. 



The circumstantial nature of the observa- 

 tions made by the several persons who had 

 to do with digging up the "meteorite," as 

 quoted in the article to which reference is 

 made, are not as conclusive to me as they are 

 to Professor Very, through scepticism en- 

 gendered by the falsity of nearly all of the 

 many reports that have come to my office dur- 

 ing the past sixteen years in which people 

 have described "meteorites" that they "had 

 actually seen fall" at their feet or on the 

 lawn in front of their houses, or in the road, 

 or in some other very near-by place. On re- 

 quest, samples of some of these " meteorites " 

 have been sent in, one of them proving to be 

 a piece of fossiliferous limestone, another a 

 bit of furnace slag, another a glacial bowlder 

 of trap rock, another a glazed stone that had 

 been used in the wall of a limekiln, another a 

 glacial bowlder of quartzite covered with a 

 film of limonite. The list might be extended 

 almost indefinitely, but it is not worth while. 

 In almost every case mentioned, the mass 

 when found "was so hot that one could not 

 bear his hand on it." 



Edmund Otis Hovey 

 American Museum or Natural History 



