Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 13
It seems obvious that such practices would in time produce great confusion and that the chances of lessening such a confusion would decrease as time passed. The history and geography of a fall must be the important factors in determining its right to be regarded individual. Of these two factors the history must be determined from all available literature, while the geography can readily be shown by mapping. To undertake this task for the meteorites of a single large geographic province such as North America seemed to the writer desirable, not only for the intrinsic value of the record, but to throw light on the question of the extent to which individual falls may be naturally or artificially distributed. Funds for assistance having been generously provided through a grant from the J. Lawrence Smith Fund of the National Academy of Sciences, such a catalogue was undertaken and is here presented.
Prof. W. C. Macnaul, of Chicago, rendered valuable assistance in the bibliographic work and translating. In the preparation of the text of this catalogue the endeavor of the writer has been to collect all published facts of importance regarding the different falls. Several methods of grouping these facts were considered, but it was finally concluded that an essentially chrono logical treatment would be the most satisfactory. Such a grouping shows in historical order the growth of knowledge regarding each fall and enables one to appreciate the difficulties of the earlier investigators and the manner in which features overlooked or not understood by them were later made clear. For example, Cambria was early described as showing nodules composed of two kinds of iron sulphide, one decomposable and regarded as troilite, the other unattacked by acids and regarded as pyrrhotite. It remained for later investigation to show that the pude composable constituent was schreibersite.
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