Another of the giant meteorites, the 14-ton Willamette, Oregon, iron, became the center of a long legal battle in the early 1900’s. The man who originally found the meteorite and recognized its true nature felt that because the iron was on the surface of the ground and not buried beneath it (as the ore of a metal would have been), there was no reason why he should not move the mass from the place of find to his own property, three-fourths of a mile away. He did this very laboriously by means of a log-timber car, a capstan with wire rope, and a small horse. On learning what the finder had done, the company that owned the land from which the meteorite had been removed put its attorneys on the job of recovering the “purloined” meteorite. The Oregon courts, bowing to decisions made in previous cases involving ownership of meteorites, brought in a verdict favoring the owners of the land. Although the finder of the Willamette meteorite lost the decision, he nevertheless won the distinction of being the only man to have successfully made off with a treasure weighing 14 tons! [Illustration: COURTESY OF AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Peary’s photograph of the Cape York meteorite as it was being moved for loading aboard his ship.] [Illustration: COURTESY OF AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Arrival of the 34-ton iron mass at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.] The biggest meteorite of all, of course, is the one that “got away.” In 1916, a captain in the Mauritanian army was taken by a native guide, secretly and at night, to the site of a colossal iron meteorite located in the dunes of the Adrar desert, in the far western reaches of the vast Sahara. The officer described the mass as measuring 100 meters (over 300 feet) by 40 meters (over 120 feet), with the third dimension hidden by the sand dunes. According to him, the mass “... jutted up in the midst of sand dunes that were covered by a desert plant, the _sba_, and it had the form of a compact, unfissured parallelopiped. The visible portion of the surface was vertical, dominating in the manner of a cliff, the wind-blown sand that was scooped away from the base of the mass so that the summit overhung; and that portion exposed to eolian [wind] erosion was polished like a mirror.” The captain, at the request of his uneasy guide, returned from his hurried excursion without taking notes or making a map. But he did bring back a small 10-pound fragment of iron which he had found lying on top of the giant mass. This small fragment later proved to be a genuine meteorite, and is the only known specimen of the famous Adrar mass. It is preserved at present in the Museum of Natural History at Paris.