It seems, however, to have been assumed here that this iron, as a matter of course, is meteoric, because it contains those admixtures of nickel and cobalt which accompany other known meteoric productions. It appears to me that the hypothesis is not very satisfactorily or conclusively made out.
The mass I sent home weighs about 1400 pounds, and, making allowance for what may have been taken from it at Buenos Ayres, may probably when it arrived there have been not much less than a ton weight. Now De Celis estimates the mass he examined to have been about fifteen tons weight, and of much larger dimensions: either this therefore is only a fragment of what he particularly described, or it is another which has been found in the same part of the country, and if so, is corroborative of the Indian accounts of there being more in the vicinity. This was the opinion of Dr. Redhead, who, in writing to me on the subject, says, "The native iron found in Santiago is not a single mass, as has been said; there are several, and the most recent accounts describe them as huge trunks with deep roots (I use the expression of the natives), supposed to communicate with each other."[60]
Dr. Redhead's observation was caused by a discussion which arose here upon some other specimens of native iron, which he had forwarded to me, from the desert of Atacama, in Peru, and which were described by the late Mr. Allan in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for 1828. They were analysed by Dr. Turner, who found them to contain--
Iron . 93.4 Nickel ... 6.618 Cobalt . 0.535 ------- 100.553
a result which he considered decisive concerning their origin, because, he says, it differs from any compound hitherto described in the earth, and corresponds exactly both in appearance and composition with other meteoric iron.
But these opinions differ entirely from the belief of those who procured the specimens.
That iron is found scattered in large quantities over a plain at the foot of a mountain a little to the south-west of a small Indian village called Toconao, ten leagues from San Pedro, the capital of Atacama, and about eighty from Cobija, on the coast. The tradition there is, that the fragments have been thrown out by some volcanic explosion from the side of the neighbouring mountain, in which the people of Toconao say there is a large _veta_ of pure iron. The Indian who collected the specimens which I sent to this country was employed to _catear_, or search for mines; and the nature of his occupation rendered it requisite for him to be particular in his observations: his account was, that "they were taken from a heap of the same nature, estimated at about three hundred-weight, and that they existed at the month of a _veta_, or vein of solid iron, situated at the foot of a mountain; he called them '_reventazones_,' or explosions from the mine, or _veta_. He had been charged to bring a piece of the _veta_ itself, and some of the rock in which it is embedded, but this he said he could not effect for want of tools; he therefore contented himself with picking up some of the pieces that were at the foot of the hill, where the mouth of the vein opens."