102 THE MAGIC OF JEWELS AND CHARMS
farmers
had bestowed the fanciful name of the "moon meteorite,'' 'had lain only
three inches beneath the surface of the ground and broke a ploughshare
when it was first struck; none of the masses appear to have been buried
deeper down than from five to six inches. The largest mass measures
twenty-four inches across the widest part and fourteen and a half at
the thickest part. These Kiowa meteorites are in a sense
gem-meteorites, for a number of beautiful and brilliant olivine
crystals occur in them; many are in two distinct zones, the inner one
being a bright transparent yellow, while the outer one is of a
dark-brown iron olivine, in reality a mixture of troilite and olivine.
The character and composition of the worked iron of meteoric origin
found in some of the Turner group of Indian mounds, in the Little Miami
Valley, Ohio, indicate that the latter may perhaps be brought into
connection with this group of meteorites. For here, as in the Frozen
North among the Esquimo, and in a number of other cases, the iron
available for primitive man was mainly that of meteorite origin.
In
view of the relatively small number of meteorites that have fallen in
historical times, and of the small part of the earth's surface actually
occupied by human settlements, we need scarcely be surprised at the
statement that there is but one credibly recorded instance of the
killing of a human being by a meteorite. This unique disaster is said
to have happened at Mhow in India, and fragments of the meteorite which
fell then are to be seen in museum collections. The great weight of
some meteorites would have rendered them very destructive had they not
fallen in the open country; the heaviest single mass actually known to
have fallen, came to the ground at Rnyahinya, Hungary, in 1866, and
weighed 547 pounds; it buried itself 11 feet in the ground. Of course
much heavier aerolites and siderites, satisfactorily recognizable as
such, have been found, the
