Some time in past ages a meteorite weighing at least ten tons shot into our atmosphere and struck the earth near the famous Cañon Diablo in Arizona, the mysterious gulch crossed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad. The discovery was made several years ago by a sheep herder, named Armijo. Finding a piece of iron with a peculiar lustrous surface which he believed to be silver, he carried it to one of the towns, where it finally fell into the hands of a geologist, who pronounced it a meteorite. The discovery was followed up, and on the crest and in the vicinity of a singular cone about four thousand feet in diameter pieces of a meteorite were found on the surface, which gave a combined weight of ten tons, in all probability but a fraction of the real monster. The iron masses were widely scattered over the slope and the adjacent _mesa_, and it was assumed that a gigantic meteorite or star had fallen and produced the cone, another striking the earth and forming what is now known as the Cañon Diablo. A large piece of meteoric iron was found twenty miles from the cone; another eight miles east of it; two thousand pieces weighing not over a few pounds or ounces were taken from the slopes; two exceeding a thousand pounds were found within a half mile, while forty or fifty weighing about one hundred pounds were discovered within a radius of half a mile. Here not only a meteor, but a large-sized meteoric shower, had succeeded in penetrating the armor of the earth, leaving many evidences of the extraordinary occurrence which may have been witnessed by the early man of what is now known as Arizona. From the peculiar and interesting evidence a geologist deduced the hypothesis that the crater known as Coon Butte could have been produced by a meteor with a diameter of fifteen hundred feet, and a careful examination with a view of discovering it was made with nicely adjusted magnetic instruments; but in no instance did they indicate the presence of a vast body of metal buried in the earth, and it was assumed that the striking of the crater by the colossal meteorite was a chance blow. [Illustration: THE CRATER OF COON BUTTE NEAR CAÑON DIABLO, near which the fragments of a meteorite have been found, and which was supposed at one time to have been made by the meteorite.] [Illustration: ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE POUND METEORITE. A part of the ten-ton meteorite which fell at Coon Butte, near Cañon Diablo.] [Illustration: ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE AND A HALF POUND METEORITE FOUND NEAR CRATER OF COON BUTTE.] [Illustration: CROSSES SHOW LARGE PIECES OF THE METEORITE FOUND AT COON BUTTE. (Seven miles in diameter.)]