* Astronomy

Cross Roads Meteorite; by Edwin E. Howell.

Last September I purchased from Mr. B. E. Baroes of Boyett, N. C. (who secured it of the finder about three weeks after it fell), a small aerolite which is here figured. It fell in the early morning about five o'clock, May 24th, 1892, in the township of Cross Roads, Wilson Co., N. C, and was seen by a young man named Gray BasB, who was only about two hundred feet distant. He seems to have been frightened by the sight and sound and waited two or three hours before going to the spot. With a stick he then dug up the meteorite, which penetrated 4 or 5 inches into the packed bat sodded earth close by a road bed. Young Bass also states that some of the grass near the spot was dead and looked as if killed by fire ! He further says that he thought the meteorite came from the northwest. From the testimony of others who heard it, however, it seems undoubtedly to have come from exactly the opposite direction, having been heard as far away as eighteen miles in a S. E. direction. Among those who heard it was a coloured boy one quarter of a mile to the S. E., Mieajoh Hales, four to six miles to the S. E. who describes the noise as "somewhat like thunder; accompanied by lesser sounds like the report of pistols or the snapping of burning reeds," Another man, Edward S. Dees, distant five or six miles nearly south, wrote in answer to my inquiries, that one clear morning before sunrise sometime in May he was in the open field and heard a peculiar noise which lasted a quarter of a minute and sounded like "a freight train crossing a trellis" - thought it came from the S. W. Wm. E. Scott, about eighteen miles to the S. E., writes that before sunrise on the 24th of May he and a neighbour heard a noise " something like a sky rocket but more like thunder which went off in a northern direction." Mr. Barnes sent the stone first to the National Museum and a fragment weighing 4 grams was broken off. With the exception of this piece nothing has been taken from it since it was picked up ; several small chips however were broken off before it reached the ground and the broken surface partly crusted again. It now weighs 157 grams and it would probably have weighed about 200 grams, if it had reached the earth unbroken. The thick even crust coating the meteorite indicates that it was a complete individual and not one of a show, The freshly broken surface is of the usual gray colour.
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