By any standards, the Society’s collection is, and always has been, extremely modest. Compared to the major Canadian research collections, such as the University of Alberta’s Meteorite Collection, the largest in Canada, or the Canadian National Meteorites Collection (JRASC 82 [1988], 24-30; Herd 2002), it is as an interplanetary dust particle to the impactor that created the Sudbury basin (N 46° 36', W 81° 11').

The history of the RASC collection is extraordinarily poorly documented for a meteorite collection. The evidence, such as it is, points to a consistently inconsistent plan of collection development, and a disquietingly inchoate approach to curation. Given the problems of continuity, it is probably to the good that nothing more ambitious was pursued. That the RASC owned and owns any meteorites at all can probably be attributed to the venerable idea that astronomical institutions of any kind with non-meteorite collections of any sort are incomplete without a few bits of space rock. The idea can ultimately be traced to natural-philosophy cabinets of the 17th century, part of the learned matrix from which associations like the RASC arose. Some associated material survives, such as lantern slides of meteoritical interest (first mentioned in JRASC 4 [1910], A35), and a few stray publications, such as A Chapter in the History of Meteorites (Flight 1887), Meteorites, Their Structure, Composition and Terrestrial Relations (Farrington 1915), and The Nininger Collection of Meteorites: A Catalog and a History (Nininger 1950). Curiously enough, McKinley 1961 [Meteor Science and Engineering] is not in the Archive’s Rare Book Collection.

It is likely that specimens were acquired through mechanisms similar to the following:

Mr. A.F. Miller, on behalf of Mr. Joseph Townsend, of Dixie, presented to the Society a very beautiful specimen of meteoritic iron. Several years ago Mr. Townsend gave the Society a fragment broken off the same specimen. Mr. Miller has learned that the meteorite was kept for years in a collection of curios owned by the late Mr. Edward Terry, of Toronto [JRASC 1 (1907), 197].

Neither specimen forms part of the collection today, nor is there any record of how and when they may have been removed for “unofficial” study purposes. One suspects that over the years the RASC has unknowingly granted several similar “loans” to more than one budding amateur collector. Such has been the success of that “programme” that the earliest acquired specimen remaining in the collection is from the Bruderheim fall of 1960 (RASC M1.19600304).

Inattention has its price. Two years ago [2007] the collection had been so decimated that the Bruderheim stone was in poor company; the rest of the collection consisted of two low-class meteorwrongs (RASC Mwr1.19XX00XX, and RASC MWr2.196100XX).

The collection is in better shape today, thanks mainly to a generous and anonymous donation by a RASC member, who said that at the very least the Society “should have a collection of which a beginning amateur wouldn’t be ashamed.” As it stands, the donor’s words are an apt characterization of the collection at present. It is fortuitous that the gift coincided with the Society’s move to its new premises, for the Archives can now provide a much-improved measure of climate control, and stable heat and humidity conditions, to help check the processes of meteorite terrestrialization.

Catalogue

Given the limited size of the collection, a little more detail can be supplied in the fields than is usually the case in catalogues. This is not to be taken as a sign of the relative importance of the specimens in the RASC collection; rather it attests to the opposite. It should also be noted that characterizations of the meteorites are referred to descriptions of the type specimens, or other properly analyzed specimens in the literature, for samples from none of the RASC specimens have been subject to extensive laboratory analysis. This catalogue has been prepared with the needs of the amateur uppermost, rather than the professional.