The stone was seen to fall, at about 1 p.m. on March 9, 1923, by a thatcher named Frederick Pratt who was working at the time in a corner os a wheat-field on Ashdon Hall farm, Ashdon, near Saffron Walden, Essex. He heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound, and, supposing an aeroplane was overhead, looked up and a second or two after saw what he thought was a projectile fall about thirty yards from him into the wheat-field a few feet from the farm-road, causing the earth to ‘fly up like water’. Three days later, in company with another worker on Ashdon tIall farm named Curven, he dug up the stone from a depth of about two feet.

Through the kindness of Mr. F. W. FitzSimons, Director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, South Africa, pieces of this iron were placed at the disposal of the writer for examination and analysis. The original mass, weighing about 203 lb. (92 kg.), was found at Karee Kloof, about nine miles from Hofmeyer, Cape Province, South Africa, and was presented to the Port Elizabeth Musem by Mr. N. H. Ogilvie in 1914. From a cast which was made under the direction of Miss M. Wilman, Director of the McGregor Memorial Musemn, Kimberley, the dimensions of the mass are approximately 43 × 30 × 20 cm. It is very irregularly shaped, is pitted with ‘thumb-marks’, and is cavernous with depressions, one of which on the side shown in Pl. III, fig. 1, has dimensions of about 20 × 15 × 7½ cm.

The Meldon aplite is a small intrusion lying to the north-west of the Dartmoor granite about two miles south-west of Okehampton. Its microscopic characters were investigated by Sir Jethro Teall, whilst the geology of the district, with petrological accounts of the aplite and its associated rocks, has been fully dealt with by R. H. Worth, who notes the presence of felspar, quartz, mica, tourmaline, topaz, apafite, fluor-spar, montmorillonite, and axlnite.

At many places in ‘The Peak District’ of Derbyshire, the igneous rocks, locally called ‘toadstones’, have, to varying extents, suffered an alteration with, as a result, the production of clays—locally called ‘toadstone-clay’. These clays attracted the attention of the present author some years ago, and since that time, whilst conducting extensive ‘field’ investigations in the course of a survey of the minerals of Derbyshire, observations on them have been ahnost continuously made and the deductions drawn therefrom carefully considered.