THE MEXICAN METEORITES. 
BY 
John Robie Eastman. 
[Read before the Society, January 2,1892.] 
For many years remarkable accounts of wonderful speci¬ 
mens of iron meteorites, discovered in Mexico, have been 
scattered through nearly all the principal chemical journals 
and in many of the astronomical publications of the world. 
Great confusion is constantly arising in the literature of 
meteorites from the fact that a large amount of the data is 
derived from persons who have no definite ideas of time, 
direction, distance, locality, or weight; in fact, so widely 
divergent are the various descriptions of the same meteoric 
mass that it seems almost certain that the several accounts 
refer to widely separated and totally unlike bodies. 
In no locality has this confusion of information reached a 
more exasperating stage than in Mexico. The mineralogist, 
the man who travels for pleasure, the miner, the adventurer, 
and the pseudo-scientific man, who knows a little of many 
things and nothing well, have all brought to the general 
stock of information their contributions of special, partial, 
and distorted data mixed with hearsay evidence of localities 
“ over the mountain ” until one is led to doubt all statements 
till they are confirmed by the sight of the meteorite and by 
the chemist’s analysis. 
Very gratifying progress, however, has lately been made 
in unraveling the tangled and often contradictory accounts 
of the Mexican meteorites by the publication of two impor¬ 
tant papers on this subject. 
7—Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 12. 
(39) 
