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The tektite problem1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

L. J. Spencer*
Affiliation:
Formerly Keeper of Minerals, British Museum of Natural History, LondonEngland

Extract

The natural glasses, found as small corroded pieces scattered on the earth's surface and in alluvial deposits in a few limited areas, have long presented a puzzling problem; and many theories have been propounded to explain their origin. They have been known in southern Bohemia and western Moravia since before 1787; and similar material has since been found in the Dutch East Indies, Malay States, Australia, Tasmania, French Indo-China, south China, Philippine Islands, and quite recently in the Ivory Coast in West Africa [M.A. 6-106]. These glasses are distinct in chemical composition from volcanic glass (obsidian), and there are no volcanoes in the districts where they are found. They have been given the names m oldavites, billitonites, austral ites, Darwin glass, indoch inites, rizalitcs [M.A. 4-422; 6-403], &c.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1937

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Footnotes

1

Read by Prof. L. F. Brady at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for Research on Meteorites, University of California at Los Angeles, June 23 and 24, 1936. Reprinted from Popular Astronomy, Northfield, Minnesota, 1936, vol: 44, pp. 381–383. References to Mineralogical Abstracts [M.A.] and the Mineralogical Magazine have been inserted in this reprint

References

1 Read by Prof. L. F. Brady at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for Research on Meteorites, University of California at Los Angeles, June 23 and 24, 1936. Reprinted from Popular Astronomy, Northfield, Minnesota, 1936, vol: 44, pp. 381–383. References to Mineralogical Abstracts [M.A.] and the Mineralogical Magazine have been inserted in this reprint