2o6 The American Geologist. October, 1902. 
in all this there was no definite description of the mass, and no 
one who mentioned it claimed to have seen it. We were anx- 
ious to ascertain about all this. The Mexican savants we-e 
all interested in having this great celestial body investigated. 
One of them, Senor Jose C. Aguilera, the director of the In- 
stituto Geologico, a government institution, and the present 
headquarters of the geological survey of the Republic, aided 
me in obtaining from the Minister of State letters to the 
governor of Sinaloa and to the director of mines in that state. 
I had decided to visit Bacubirito, for so the place and the mete- 
orite itself was called, and see what was fact, and what was 
rumor about it. So on the 2nd of April of the present year 
1 started out to resolve the matter. Sinaloa is a hard state to 
reach from the city of Alexico. One must pass far around to 
the north through the United States, returning south through 
Sonora, a journey^ of over 2,000 miles, or go by the Pacific 
coast, a shorter but harder route. We took this latter, cross- 
ing by train aiid mule-back to ]\Ianzanillo, the sea-port of the 
state of Colima, and thence by steam up the coast for six hun- 
dred miles to Altata, on the east coast of the gulf of Califor- 
nia ; thence 60 miles by cars to the city of Culiacan, the cap- 
ital of Sinaloa. Here we met the governor of the state, and 
from him obtained letters to authorities further up the countr\-. 
We also got an outfit of provisions, a carriage with four 
mules, and an American photographer who accompanied us 
with his camera. Bacubirito is 95 miles to the north and west 
of Culiacan. Our drive took three days, over a very rough 
road, crossing some streams and ravines, and gradually rising 
to and among the lower foot-hills of the Sierra Madre, the 
great Cordilleras chain which separates Sinaloa from the 
states of Chihuahua and Durango. Bacubirito itself, our 
goal in this search, is a small but very old mining town situ- 
ated on the Rio Sinaloa in the latitude 26 and in west longi- 
tude 107. The elevation above sea level is some 2,000 feet. 
The meteorite is seven miles nearly due sciith from there, 
near the hamlet called Palmar de la Sepulveda. Here we 
found it on a farm called Ranchito, which fills the narrow 
mountain valley or interval between two spurs of the foothills, 
running nearly north and south. It lay in a corn field, close 
by the eastern edge of this vale where the level ground began 
