Between Adamana and Flagstaff is a strangely interesting country. Here is Meteorite Mountain, where evidently a huge meteor fell into the earth with terrific force, upheaving all the surrounding crust and thus producing a mountain with an enormous cavity in its centre. For five years men have been digging here to find the meteor. They have excavated huge fragments of it. The vast hollow crater where the meteorite is supposed to have fallen into the ground is a mile wide. In some fragments of the meteor which were submitted to Sir William Crookes for examination that great scientist found diamonds in small but unmistakable quantities.
The Meteorite Mountain is situated not more than ten miles south of Cañon Diablo, from which station the traveller may drive to this phenomenal cavity. Within recent months shafts are being projected into the earth to discover, if possible, whether the meteoric theory is the true one. More and more, with every year, is science undertaking to "pluck out the heart of the mystery" in this problematic Arizona. Prof. G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, has made a special study of this phenomenon, and it is he who experimented with a magnetic test, assuming that if an enormous meteorite had hurled itself into the earth until it was buried past excavation, the great mass of metallic iron would still respond to the test, and furnish unmistakable proof of its presence if subjected to magnetic attraction. A scientific writer who has recently made a study of Meteorite Mountain thus reports the conditions:
"The mountain is about two hundred feet high, and there are a few stunted pines about its forbidding looking slopes. Going to the top of this mountain, over huge masses of strange-looking rock, one will find a great depression, generally called the crater, though there are no evidences of its volcanic formation. This crater is a huge bowl one mile across and six hundred feet deep. The winds of the desert have blown much sand into the crater, evidently covering the bottom of the depression to a depth of many feet. There is a level space of about forty acres in the bottom of the crater.
"When the gigantic meteor fell hissing into the earth, if it ever did so, the concussion must have been terrific. And in this connection it is interesting to note that the Indians near by have a legend about a huge star falling out of the heavens and dazzling the tribe with its brightness. Then there was a great shock and sudden darkness, and ever since then the Indians have regarded Meteorite Mountain with awe. Some idea of the action of the meteorite can be obtained by throwing a stone into the mud. When the meteorite buried itself far into the earth the sides were heaved up, leaving a rim-like circle about the depression. As the meteorite sank into the earth it must have crushed layers of red sandstone and limestone. It is believed that the white sand found in the crater and on the sides of the mountain is from the sandstone pulverized by the meteor in its descent. This sand was blown skyward and afterward settled down on the mountain, covering it thickly. No sand like it is to be found near the mountain.
"Men searching the ground surrounding the mountain for a distance of several miles find small meteorites. Several of these weigh as much as one thousand pounds, and others weigh only a fraction of an ounce. The largest pieces were found furthest from the mountain. These meteorites have been proved to be practically non-magnetic. This may explain why the immense body of iron in the buried meteor has not shown any magnetic properties. Needles taken to the mountain have not shown the presence of any great magnetic attraction, and this fact puzzled scientists until it was found that the fragments found near the mountain did not possess magnetism.
"Another interesting discovery is the presence of what is called 'iron shale' near the mountain. These are fragments of burned or 'dead' iron. They might have been broken from the meteorite at the time of the terrific impact, or they might have been snapped from the larger body owing to a sudden cooling process. Inasmuch as the Cañon Diablo country was at one time an immense inland sea, another interesting theory has been brought forth,—that the meteor fell into this sea, and that the great number of splinters of iron in the neighborhood were caused by the sudden cooling of the molten mass. It has been discovered that these small meteorites contain diamonds."
In the immediate vicinity of Meteorite Mountain several tons of meteoric fragments have been found of which Prof. George Wharton James has one, weighing about a ton, on his lawn at his charming residence in Pasadena. There are also found in this vicinity large amounts of shale which scientists pronounce analogous to the meteorite, but "dead"; yet this shale is highly magnetic and possesses polarity,—one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible properties of electricity.
Professor Gilbert did not meet success when he tried the magnetic test, and in discussing this matter in an address on "The Origin of Hypotheses," delivered before the Geological Society in Washington last year, he said:
"Still another contribution to the subject, while it does not increase the number of hypotheses, is nevertheless important in that it tends to diminish the weight of the magnetic evidence and thus to reopen the question which Mr. Baker and I supposed we had settled. Our fellow-member, Mr. Edwin E. Howell, through whose hands much of the meteoric iron had passed, points out that each of the iron masses, great and small, is in itself a complete individual. They have none of the characters that would be found if they had been broken one from another, and yet, as they are all of one type and all reached the earth within a small district, it must be supposed that they were originally connected in some way.
"Reasoning by analogy from the characters of other meteoric bodies, he infers that the irons were all included in a large mass of some different material, either crystalline rock, such as constitutes the class of meteorites called 'stony,' or else a compound of iron and sulphur, similar to certain nodules discovered inside the iron masses when sawn in two. Neither of these materials is so enduring as iron, and the fact that they are not now found on the plain does not prove their original absence. Moreover, the plain is strewn in the vicinity of the crater with bits of limonite, a mineral frequently produced by the action of air and water on iron sulphides, and this material is much more abundant than the iron. If it be true that the iron masses were thus embedded, like plums in an astral pudding, the hypothetic buried star might have great size and yet only small power to attract the magnetic needle. Mr. Howell also proposes a qualification of the test by volumes, suggesting that some of the rocks beneath the buried star might have been condensed by the shock so as to occupy less space.
"These considerations are eminently pertinent to the study of the crater and will find appropriate place in any comprehensive discussion of its origin; but the fact which is peculiarly worthy of note at the present time is their ability to unsettle a conclusion that was beginning to feel itself secure. This illustrates the tentative nature not only of the hypotheses of science, but of what science calls its results.
"The method of hypotheses, and that method is the method of science, founds its explanations of nature wholly on observed facts, and its results are ever subject to the limitations imposed by imperfect observation. However grand, however widely accepted, however useful its conclusions, none is so sure that it cannot be called into question by a newly discovered fact. In the domain of the world's knowledge there is no infallibility."
Sir William Crookes has been deeply interested in the phenomenon of Meteorite Mountain, which must take rank with the Petrified Forests and even with the Grand Cañon as one of the marvels of Arizona. The meteoric shower which seems to have accompanied the falling of the huge meteorite—if the theory of its existence is true—has recorded its traces over a radius of more than five miles from the crater-like cavity. The experiment of Dr. Foote is thus described:
"An ardent mineralogist, the late Dr. Foote, in cutting a section of this meteorite, found the tools were injured by something vastly harder than metallic iron, and an emery wheel used in grinding the iron had been ruined. He examined the specimen chemically, and soon after announced to the scientific world that the Cañon Diablo Meteorite contained black and transparent diamonds. This startling discovery was afterwards verified by Professors Friedel and Moissan, who found that the Cañon Diablo Meteorite contained the three varieties of carbon,—diamond (transparent and black), graphite, and amorphous carbon. Since this revelation the search for diamonds in meteorites has occupied the attention of chemists all over the world.
"Here, then, we have absolute proof of the truth of the meteoric theory. Under atmospheric influences the iron would rapidly oxidize and rust away, coloring the adjacent soil with red oxide of iron. The meteoric diamonds would be unaffected and left on the surface to be found by explorers when oxidation had removed the last proof of their celestial origin. That there are still lumps of iron left in Arizona is merely due to the extreme dryness of the climate and the comparatively short time that the iron has been on our planet. We are here witnesses to the course of an event which may have happened in geologic times anywhere on the earth's surface."
In this desert plateau of dull red sandstone worn by the erosion and the storms of untold ages, does there indeed lie a submerged star? And if there does, buried so deep in the earth as to elude as yet all the research of science, what force projected it, "shot madly from its sphere," into the desert lands of Arizona? To visit these extraordinary things—the Petrified Forests, the Meteorite Mountain, the Grand Cañon—is to feel, in the words of the poet,—