* Astronomy

On August 10, 1918, four or five fragments of a stony meteorite, weighing together about 22 grams, and stated to have fallen on the farm of Witklip, Carolina District, Transvaal, on May 26, 1918, were received by the Union Observatory, through the editor of 'De Volkstem', Pretoria, and were chemically examined by Dr. J. Moir of the Government Chemical Laboratory.
The fragment (BM. 1921, 275) sent to the British Museum by Dr. Peringuey shows no crust. This, according to Dr. J. Molt, is 'deep brown-olive in colour and is very thin--not much over ~6 mm. on the whole '. The interior of the stone is grey in colour, somewhat friable and shows some well-defined spherical chondrules and clear-cut cavities from which chondrules have broken away. On a cut surface, strings and grains of nickel-iron are fairly plentiful and troilite is present in smaller amount. A micro-section under the microscope shows nickel- iron and troilite, orthorhombie pyroxene polarizing in greys, olivine clear and colourless, and twinned clinobronzite in a tufaceous matrix of small grains of the same minerals. Chondrules arc fairly abundant, some of which have clearly marked circular sections, but most are ill defined and pass gradually into the matrix. They are of the usual types, some barred with alternating orthorhombic pyroxene and deep- brown glass with a rim of pyroxene in optical continuity with the bars, and some are of the porphyritic type showing well-defined olivine in a dark base which under a high power is seen to consist mainly of fibrous pyroxene having a high extinction-angle. Felspathic material and maskelynite are present in only small amount; no merrillite was detected.
The Witklip meteoric stone is a grey chondrite and, as it somewhat closely resembles that from Cronstad and contains a fairly high percentage of nickel-iron, it is in all probability a bronzite-chondrite.
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