34 
like that of the present one, in Yorkshire.* Another coinci¬ 
dence of the present stone-fall, at a time when the interest of 
astronomical enterprise is largely centred, as it has lately been, 
upon expeditions to the colonies and to more remote stations at 
the Antipodes to observe transits of Yenus across the sun’s disc 
in the years 1874 and 1882, it deserves a passing recollection 
that the village of Marton, in or near the parish in which the 
fall of the present aerolite took place, claims the parentage of 
the great English navigator. Captain Cook, who lost his life in 
the gallant services which he rendered to astronomy in the 
leadership of those adventurous expeditions which were organ¬ 
ised to the Pacific Islands a hundred years ago, at the occasion 
of the similar transits of Yenus in the years 1761 and 1769. 
While the proper destination of this new-found aerolitic acqui¬ 
sition will, in due course, be the well-supplied collection of such 
rare and curious relics in the new mineralogical galleries of the 
British National Museum, it is yet to be confidently hoped that 
an opportunity for exhibiting it also in the county of its recent 
fall and discovery may be in reservation for it, in the Museum 
of Scientific Objects at York, now projected and in progress of 
preparation for the approaching fiftieth anniversary meeting of 
the British Association in August next, in that City. A fuller 
facility than in the national collection will thus presumably be 
afibrded to inhabitants of the district in which it fell, who re¬ 
gard with cmlous or scientific interest the doubtful and often 
controverted history of such earth-alighted asteroids, of seeing 
at length, and actually contemplating for themselves, a 
specimen of a real English-fallen and English-authenticated 
meteorite. 
But is it in vain to entertain a wish that the already 
teeming collection which the British Museum boasts of these 
homeless travellers through the voids of space might in the 
present case resign its cogent claims to the new possession, and 
*Note.— This omits mention, however, of much less considerable hut yet 
authenticated stonefalls at Basingstoke, Hants (1806), Malpas, Cheshire (1813), 
Glastonbury, Somerset (1816), Launton, Oxfordshire (1830) and Aldsworth, near 
Cirencester (1835). There are also some records of the fall of an iron meteorite 
at Bayden, Wilts., in the year 182.5; and of an ordinary aerolite (Kamtz) at 
Harrogate, in Yorkshire, in the j^ear 1842. (See Mr. R. P. Greg’s Catalogue of 
Meteorites and Fireballs in the Reports of the British ^Association for the year 
1860. 
