o vast masses weighing many hundredweights. There
are also models of celebrated meteorites, of which the originals are
dispersed through various other museums.

Many meteorites have nothing very remarkable in their external
appearance. If they were met with on the sea beach, they would be passed
by without more notice than would be given to any other stone. Yet, what
a history a meteorite might tell us if we could only manage to obtain
it! It fell; it was seen to fall from the sky; but what was its course
anterior to that movement? Where was it 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago?
Through what regions of space has it wandered? Why did it never fall
before? Why has it actually now fallen? Such are some of the questions
which crowd upon us as we ponder over these most interesting bodies.
Some of these objects are composed of very characteristic materials;
take, for example, one of the more recent arrivals, known as the Rowton
siderite. This body differs very much from the more ordinary kind of
stony meteorite. It is an object which even a casual passer-by would
hardly pass without notice. Its great weight would also attract
attention, while if it be scratched or rubbed with a file, it would
appear to be a mass of nearly pure iron. We know the circumstances in
which that piece of iron fell to the earth. It was on the 20th of April,
1876, about 3.40 p.m., that a strange rumbling noise, followed by a
startling explosion, was heard over an area of several miles in extent
among the villages in Shropshire, eight or ten miles north of the
Wrekin. About an hour after this occurrence a farmer noticed that the
ground in one of his grass-fields had been disturbed, and he probed the
hole which the meteorite had made, and found it, still warm, about
eighteen inches below the surface. Some men working at no great distance
had heard the noise made in its descent. This remarkable object, weighs
7-3/4 lbs. It is an irregular angular mass of iron, though all its edges
seem to have been rounded by fusion in its transit through the air. It
is covered with a thick black pellicle of the magnetic oxide of iron,
except at the point where it first struck the ground. The Duke of
Cleveland, on whose property it fell, afterwards presented it to our
national institution already referred to, where, as the Rowton siderite,
it attracts the attention of everyone who is interested in these
wonderful bodies.

This siderite is specially interesting on account o