Jfeteorites and What they Teach us.—Ilensoldt. 33 
India, while the latter — the largest and perhaps the finest stone- 
meteorite as yet discovered on the continent of America — was 
'found by the writer near Lagrange, Texas, in January, 1888. 
Now these localities are more than 6,000 miles distant from 
each other and there is also a great difference in the dates of 
fall (the Fayette county meteorite, from the appearance of its 
crust, must have fallen more than fifty years ago) yet the 
microscope reveals absolutely no difference in the sections 
Always the same chondri or their fragments, always the same 
five minerals : olivine, bronzite, augite, plagioclase and iron 
as the principal constituents. This would tend to show that 
there exists a surprising uniformity among the cosmical 
particles from which meteorites originate. 
Fortunately the labors of Tschermak and Daubree have 
made it possible for us to distinguish without much trouble, 
an olivine chondrum from one of augite, bronzite or triclinic 
feldspar, but as we can not here go into elaborate details we 
merely point out in a general way that chondri which are 
traversed by parallel bars, or a sort of grating, may be put 
down as olivine, those with a granular structure as augite, 
those exhibiting a fine parallel striation between crossed- 
Nicols as triclinic feldspar and those which show a peculiar 
fibrous, radiating or fan-like structure, as bronzite. The 
feldspar is almost invariably anorthite, the most basic of all 
feldspars — a significant fact as we shall see later on, but we 
occasionally meet with a peculiar singly-refractive variety of 
plagioclase, which has been called maskelynite, but which in 
the opinion of the writer is nothing but anorthite rendered 
singly-refractive hy partial fusion. The astonishing similarity 
between chondritic meteorites enables us to limit our descrip- 
tion to a few prominent types. The meteorite of Renazzo, 
which fell in Italy in 1824, consists of chondri, cemented 
together by a dark paste of carbonaceous matter, in which an 
immense number of particles of pure iron are distributed. 
These of course can not be distinguished under the microscope 
from the black matrix, as both are perfectly opaque. But an 
ordinary hand-lens reveals the remarkable fact that each 
chondrum is surrounded by a crust of metallic iron. Some- 
times this crust is very thick, so that it often seems as if a 
chondrum of iron had a nucleus of olivine. The Tieschitz 
meteorite which fell in Moravia in 1878, is composed, in part, 
