Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/27

Rh Amherst and Washing-ton were very gradually brought together. There was no concentrated effort made to extend them; the scientific thought of the last century, except towards its close, had not keenly awakened to a realization of the almost marvelous connotations implied in these strange aerial vagrants, and the opportunities for their discovery had not been actually availed of.

No one in the United States has exhibited greater perseverance and a more boundless, almost reckless, enthusiasm in this work of collecting meteorites than Professor Henry A. Ward. His audacity and zeal have gone hand in hand with a very keen scientific sense of the meaning of meteorites, and an admirable acquaintance with the literature and the results that have developed in their study.

He has himself been an explorer in this field, and it would be safe to predict his first arrival at the scene of any new meteorite's fall to-day. His correspondence is extensive, and the merest mention of a meteorite occurrence flies to his desk, and is very quickly subjected to his pertinacious system of verification or exposure.

The Ward-Coonley collection of meteorites now exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History represents his tireless work through many years, and stands to-day first amongst the collections of meteorites in this country. In the possession of large, unique masses, other collections may at points excel it, but in its representative character and in the actual number of 'falls,' it surpasses all others. The reader unacquainted with the peculiar pride of meteorite collectors may, perchance, welcome a little elucidation.

Meteorites are named from the locality in which they fall, or are found. But few meteorites have ever been seen to fall, and hence the meteorite mass, when discovered, is given a name (by which it is ever afterwards distinguished) that is derived from its exact locality or neighborhood. Thus Cañon Diablo, Arizona, Mincy Taney Co., Mo., Brenham, Kansas, Mocs, Transylvania, Estherville, Emmet Co., Iowa, are familiar labels in these collections. These designations sometimes of necessity assume a curious character, as the Vaca Muerta meteorite, or 'dead cow,' so named in the desert of Atacama, Chili, from its proximity to the corpse of that quadruped, the only, or at least a striking, physical feature in an otherwise featureless waste. Such a name remains after its origin has disappeared.

A certain number of localities, however, have frequently proved to be but representative of a prolonged fall. A meteorite mass, meeting the atmosphere of our earth, becomes, through friction, enormously heated, disruption takes place, and the separated parts, instead of falling at one spot, are dropped in succession at widely removed points, and thus a series of names becomes synonymous. Long examination and careful comparison, such, for instance, as Fletcher, of the British Museum, has