32 
line some paces past the signal-box. At a distance of nineteen 
yards from the latter, and forty-eight yards from where they 
first stood, one of the men, Frank Henwood, saw from the field 
at the foot of the slight embankment of the line the month of 
a round vertical hole into which a man’s arm might he thrust. 
His companion, H. Obren, sounded the hole with his hand; 
but he withdrew it immediately on feeling the hole and the 
body at the bottom of it to be heated, or as he describes them 
both to have been when he felt them about three minutes after 
the fall took place, “ about new milk warm.” The hole has, in 
fact, exactly the round well-excavated appearance in the turf of 
some field-animal’s burrow, at the bottom of which a too rash 
intruder would not be unaccountably perplexed to find himself 
rather suddenly entrapped with something more than a merely 
comfortable warm reception. But relying on the body’s obvious 
fall and penetration from the air, Obren again dived for the 
object with his hand, and loosening it easily with his fingers 
drew out the occupant from the hole. 
It is a beautifully perfect meteorite ; of a low pyramidal 
or shell-like shape, measuring about five inches by six inches, 
and about three inches high, and weighing about three and a 
half pounds. The grey tufaceous stone of which it consists 
internally is, as usual, completely swathed, and enveloped in a 
thin black molten crust, which hides from the eye its true stony 
character, the latter being only visible here and there at its 
frayed edges. The loose mould adhering to some of its furrows 
was easily cleaned and removed off its smooth surface with the 
hand ; and the peculiar looking stone was laid for the time on 
a neighbouring ballast-heap under the impression that it was a 
slag-fragment accidentally projected from some blasting opera¬ 
tion in the vicinity. Careful attention was nevertheless be¬ 
stowed upon its preservation by Mr. Ellin or, who forwarded it 
on the following day with a circumstantial account of the par¬ 
ticulars of its fall to the chief engineer of the North-Eastern 
Hallway Company’s Darlington district, Mr. W. J. Cudworth. 
At Mr. Jas. I’Anson’s advice, of Fairfield House, Darlington, 
it was submitted to me for examination by Mr. Cudworth on 
Friday last, and I have had the pleasure fully to confirm these 
