X. On the mineral constituents of meteorites

Abstract

I. The applications of the Microscope in the investigation of Meteorites . The mineralogical investigation of a meteoric stone presents difficulties very similar to those which have hitherto rendered the analyses and descriptions of many of the finer-grained terrestrial rocks unsatisfactory ; for a meteoric stone is in fact a fragment of a rock, though formed under conditions in some respects widely differing from those which have produced the rocks of our globe. The difficulties alluded to arise from the minute size and imperfectly developed crys­tallisation of the mineral constituents alike of the rock and the aërolite ; and they have in general baffled the efforts of the chemist on the one hand to effect their separate analyses, and of the crystallographer on the other hand to determine the forms of these constituents. The chemist indeed has endeavoured to overcome the difficulty by attempt­ing a chemical separation of the constituent minerals of these fine-grained mixtures into one group of such as are soluble and another group of those which are insoluble in acids, and then treating the numbers obtained from the analyses of these groups by the light of theoretical considerations founded on the formulae and properties of known minerals. This method is necessarily only an approximative one. Even granting that by its means, we could divide a rock into two classes of ingredients, which we cannot in fact accurately do, there remains the question of how to separate from each other the mingled minerals in, for instance, its insoluble portion.