Ch. 2: Meteorites Celestial Stones Gems

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	ON METEORITES, OR CELESTIAL STONES 99 been found possessed the right to reclaim it from the finder. When weighed on the railroad scales in Portland, Oregon, the net weight of this siderite was shown to be 31,107 pounds. The most striking peculiarity is the abundance of pittings and hollows and their unusual size. That these resulted in part from the effects of the enormous heat generated by the swift flight of this weighty mass through the earth's atmosphere, is generally admitted; but some of the deepest pits are believed to owe their origin to the decomposition of spheroidal nodules of troilite, and the cylindrical holes to the decomposition of rod-like masses of the same substance. Willamette, which was donated to the American Museum of Natural History, by Mrs. William E. Dodge, is 10 feet long, 6 feet 6 inches high, and has a thickness of 4 feet 3 inches.⁴⁹ Chemical analyses have been made by Mr. J. M. Davison of the University of Rochester and by J. E. Whitfield of Philadelphia. Their respective determinations are here given:



	The famous Canon Diablo meteorite possesses a surpassing mineralogical interest.⁶⁰ In 1891, at the Tenth International Geologic Congress, Washington, D. C, the mineralogist Koenig announced that he had discovered some • Edmund Otis Hovey, " The Foyer Collection of Meteorites," American Mueeum of Natural History, Guide Leaflet No. 26, December, 1907, pp. 27, 28. " See the present writer's " Diamond and Moissanite ; Natural, Artificial and Meteoric," a lecture delivered at the Twelfth General Meeting of the American Electro-chemical Society in New York City, October 18, 1907; here the literature on this important meteor is fully given. Two other interesting meteorites are described by George F. Kunz and Ernest Weinschenk in the American Journal of Science, vol. xliii, May 1892, pp. 424-426, figures.

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