The first announcement of the discovery of these diamonds from the Cañon
Diablo meteorite was made by Dr. A. E. Foote, and not long after
Professor Koenig’s determination of their character, the present writer
suggested an experiment that would afford absolute proof that the
material was really diamond. This was to charge a new skaif, or
diamond-polishing wheel, with the supposed diamond dust obtained from
the meteorite; should the material polish a diamond there could be no
doubt as to its character. On September 11, 1893, this experiment was
tried at the Mining Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition. After
the skaif had been charged with the residuum separated from the
meteorite by Dr. O. W. Huntington, it was given a speed of 2500
revolutions to the minute, and in less than fifteen minutes a small flat
surface had been ground down and polished on a cleavage-piece of rough
diamond held against the wheel. The experiment was then repeated several
times on other diamonds and always successfully. This showed
conclusively that the residuum of the meteorite contained many minute
diamond fragments.[183]
A most important group of meteorites were found in 1886 in Brenham
township, Kiowa County, Kansas, by some of the farmers of this district
in the course of their farming operations.[184] Entirely unaware of
their scientific value, the finders used these objects to weight down
haystacks, or for similar uses to which they would put small boulders.
In all some twenty of these specimens have been recovered, varying in
weight all the way from 466 pounds down to a single ounce. Most of them
were taken from an area of about sixty acres, although some were
scattered over a wider tract. The largest piece of the group, that on
which the farmers had bestowed the fanciful name of the “moon
meteorite,” had lain only three inches beneath the surface of the ground
and broke a ploughshare when it was first struck; none of the masses
appear to have been buried deeper down than from five to six inches. The
largest mass measures twenty-four inches across the widest part and
fourteen and a half at the thickest part. These Kiowa meteorites are in
a sense gem-meteorites, for a number of beautiful and brilliant olivine
crystals occur in them; many are in two distinct zones, the inner one
being a bright transparent yellow, while the outer one is of a dark
brown iron olivine, in reality a mixture of troilite and olivine. The
character and composition of the worked iron of meteoric origin found in
some of the Turner group of Indian mounds, in the Little Miami Valley,
Ohio, indicate that the latter may perhaps be brought into connection
with this group of meteorites. For here, as in the Frozen North among
the Esquimo, and in a number of other cases, the iron available for
primitive man was mainly that of meteorite origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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