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42 familiar. Professor Newton, whose specialty they were, has said: "In general they show no resemblance in their mechanical or mineralogical structure to the granitic and surface rocks of the Earth. One

condition was certainly necessary in their formation, viz. the absence of free oxygen and of enough water to oxidize the iron." Thus they are not of the Earth earthy; nor yet, poor little waifs, of the upper crust of any other body.

In them prove to be occluded gases, which can be got out by heating in the laboratory, and which must have got in when the meteorites were still subjected to great heat and pressure. For only thus could these gases have been absorbed. Both such heat and such pressure accuse some great solid body as origin of this flotsam of the sky. Fragments now, they owe to its disruption