May, 1902. METEORITE STUDIES, I—FARRINGTON. 303 
given by Mr. Ward as Section 2, Township 20 S., Range 21 W. 
The village of Wellmanville is not far from this locality and this 
zrolite may therefore be called the Wellmanville stone. 
For investigating Preston’s hypothesis two lines of inquiry may 
be followed; (1) The probable course of the meteor and (2) the con- 
stitution and structure of the stones. 
(1) The probable course of the meteor: Starting from Franklin- 
ville and going in a general northwest direction the Kansada and 
Jerome stones will be found nearly in the same line at distances of 
seventeen miles to Kansada and thirteen miles further on to the 
locality of the Jerome meteorite.* Thirty miles further on in 
the same line appears the Oakley find. (See Plate XLV.) That 
a meteor may have moved along this line dropping fragments 
as it passed is conceivable, although no observed shower has 
a greater length of distribution than sixteen miles. If these 
stones. are from a single meteor the direction of movement was 
undoubtedly from southeast to northwest rather than the reverse, 
since the smaller fragments would undoubtedly fall first.t The 
Wellmanville stone is somewhat eccentric to this general course 
but it 1s quite conceivable that it may have come from the same 
meteor so far as the latter’s course is concerned. This would give a 
length of distribution of forty-six miles, or, if the Oakley stone is 
included, of eighty-six miles. The Long Island and Prairie Dog 
Creek meteorites evidently le far outside of this course, although the 
exact location of the Prairie Dog Creek find seems not to be recorded. 
Brezina gives it{ as 39°30’ N., 99°o’ W., on Sappa Creek, Decatur 
County, Kansas, whichis an utterly impossible location. However, 
Prairie Dog Creek, Decatur County, may be assumed to be its approx- 
imate place of find. The Long Island and Prairie Dog Creek locations 
form then, as shown by Preston, in connection with the Jerome and 
Ness County stones, a parallelogram 117 miles long by 35 miles © 
broad. This parallelogram extends in a north-northeast direction, a 
course at about right angles to that which I have just traced. It is 
* Dana, as quoted by Washington, states that the Jerome. meteorite was found on the Smoky 
Hill River fifteen miles east of Jerome.—Amer. Jour. of Science, 4th ser., vol. 5, p. 447. 
+1 do not know that attention has been called before to this method of deducing a meteor’s 
course, but it seems evident as a matter of reasoning that the smaller fragments would reach the 
ground first since the greater momentum possessed by the larger fragments would carry them 
farther. Meunier is of the opposite opinion (Meteorites, p. 424), but as a matter of record in all 
showers of which I have been able to obtain statistics the larger stones are found at the farther © 
end of the meteor’s path. This was the case at New Concord, Orgueil, Lancé and Butsura. For 
the purposé of. gaining further evidence on this point it is quite desirable that observers should in 
the future note the weight of the stones in connection with their location when picked up after a 
meteoric fall. 
t Die Meteoriten Sammlung, etc., Wien, May 1895, p. 359- 
