It is a singular fact that recent investigations seem to have proved that an event of this kind actually happened in North America—perhaps not longer than a thousand or two thousand years ago. The scene of the supposed catastrophe is in northern central Arizona, at Coon Butte, where there is a nearly circular crater in the middle of a circular elevation or small mountain. The crater is somewhat over four thousand feet in diameter, and the surrounding rim, formed of upturned strata and ejected rock fragments, rises at its highest point one hundred and sixty feet above the plain. The crater is about six hundred feet in depth—that is, from the rim to the visible floor or bottom of the crater. There is no evidence that volcanic action has ever taken place in the immediate neighborhood of Coon Butte. The rock in which the crater has been made is composed of horizontal sandstone and limestone strata. Between three hundred and four hundred million tons of rock fragments have been detached, and a large portion hurled by some cause out of the crater. These fragments lie concentrically distributed around the crater, and in large measure form the elevation known as Coon Butte. The region has been famous for nearly twenty years on account of the masses of meteoric iron found scattered about and known as the “Canyon Diablo” meteorites. It was one of these masses, which consist of nickel-iron containing a small quantity of platinum, and of which in all some ten tons have been recovered for sale to the various collectors throughout the world, that as before mentioned destroyed the grinding-tool at Philadelphia through the cutting power of its embedded diamonds. These meteoric irons are scattered about the crater-hill, in concentric distribution, to a maximum distance of about five miles. When the suggestion was first made in 1896 that a monster meteorite might have created by its fall this singular lone crater _in stratified rocks,_ it was greeted with incredulous smiles; but since then the matter has assumed a different aspect. The Standard Iron Company, formed by Messrs. D. M. Barringer, B. C. Tilghman, E. J. Bennitt, and S. J. Holsinger, having become, in 1903, the owner of this freak of nature, sunk shafts and bored holes to a great depth in the interior of the crater, and also trenched the slopes of the mountain, and the result of their investigations has proved that the meteoric hypothesis of origin is correct. (See the papers published in the _Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia,_ December, 1905, wherein it is proved that the United States Geological Survey was wrong in believing this crater to have been due to a steam explosion. Since that date there has been discovered a great amount of additional confirmatory proof). Material of unmistakably meteoric origin was found by means of the drills, mixed with crushed rock, to a depth of six hundred to seven hundred feet below the floor of the crater, and a