Many of these objects have nothing very remarkable in their external appearance. If they were met with on the sea-beach, they would be passed by without more notice than would be given to any other stone. Yet what a history such a stone might tell us if we could only manage to obtain it! It fell; it was seen to fall from the sky; but what was its course anterior to that movement? Where was it one hundred years ago, one thousand years ago? Through what regions of space has it wandered? Why did it never fall before? Why has it actually now fallen? Such are some of the questions which crowd upon us as we ponder over these most interesting bodies. Some of these objects are composed of very characteristic materials. Take, for example, one of the more recent meteorites, known as the Rowton siderite. This body differs very much from the more ordinary kind of stony meteorite. It is an object which even a casual passer-by would hardly pass without notice. Its great weight would also attract attention, while if it be scratched or rubbed with a file, it would be found that it was not in any sense a stone, but that it was a mass of nearly pure iron. We know the circumstances under which that piece of iron fell to the earth. It was on the 20th of April, 1876, about 3.40 P. M., that a strange rumbling noise, followed by a startling explosion, was heard over an area of several miles in extent among the villages in Shropshire. About an hour after this occurrence, a farmer noticed the ground in one of his grass-fields to have been disturbed, and he probed the hole which the meteorite had made, and found it, still warm, about eighteen inches below the surface. Some men working at no great distance had actually heard the noise of its descent, but without being able to indicate the exact locality. This remarkable object weighs 7¾ pounds. It is an irregular angular mass of iron, though all its edges seem to have been rounded by fusion in its transit through the air, and it is covered with a thick black film of the magnetic oxide of iron, except at the point where it first struck the ground. This siderite is specially interesting on account of its distinctly metallic character. Falls of the siderites, as they are called, are not so common as those of the stony meteorites; in fact, there are only a few known instances of meteoric irons having been actually seen to fall, while the falls of stony meteorites are to be counted in scores or in hundreds. The inference is that the iron meteorites are much less frequent than the stony ones. It is a wonderful thought that we should really have these visitants from the sky, solid metal or showers of dust, coming to us from distant space.