Part 2

3. These falls from the sky, when credited at all, have been deemed prodigies or miracles, and the stones have been regarded as objects for reverence and worship. It has even been conjectured that the worship of such stones was the earliest form of idolatry. The Phrygian stone, mentioned above, was worshipped at Pessinus by the Phrygians and Ph[oe]nicians as Cybele, "the mother of the gods," and its transference to Rome followed the announcement by an oracle that possession of the stone would secure to the State a continual increase of prosperity. Similarly, the Diana of the Ephesians, "which fell down from Jupiter," and the image of Venus at Cyprus, appear to have been, not statues, but conical or pyramidal stones. A stone, of which the history goes back far beyond the seventh century, is still revered by the Moslems as one of their holiest relics, and is preserved at Mecca built into the northeastern corner of the Kaaba. The late Paul Partsch,[2] for many years Keeper of Minerals in the Imperial Museum of Vienna, considered that the meteoric origin of the Kaaba stone was sufficiently proved by descriptions which had been submitted to him. A stone which fell in Japan in the year 1741, [Sidenote: Pane 4c.] and was presented to the British Museum in 1883, had long been made an annual offering in a temple of Ogi at one of the Japanese religious festivals. It may be added that a stone which lately fell in India[3] was decked with flowers, daily anointed with ghee (clarified butter), and subjected to frequent ceremonial worship and coatings of sandal-wood powder. The stone was placed on a terrace constructed for it at the place where it struck the ground, and a subscription was made for the erection of a shrine.

[Sidenote: The oldest undoubted meteoric stone still preserved.]

[Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

4. The oldest undoubted sky-stone still preserved is that which was long suspended by a chain from the vault of the choir of the parish church of Ensisheim in Elsass, and is now kept in the Rathhaus of that town. The following is a translated extract from a document which was preserved in the church:--

"On the 16th of November, 1492, a singular miracle happened: for between 11 and 12 in the forenoon, with a loud crash of thunder and a prolonged noise heard afar off, there fell in the town of Ensisheim a stone weighing 260 pounds. It was seen by a child to strike the ground in a field near the canton called Gisgaud, where it made a hole more than five feet deep. It was taken to the church as being a miraculous object. The noise was heard so distinctly at Lucerne, Villing, and many other places, that in each of them it was thought that some houses had fallen. King Maximilian, who was then at Ensisheim, had the stone carried to the castle: after breaking off two pieces, one for the Duke Sigismund of Austria and the other for himself, he forbade further damage, and ordered the stone to be suspended in the parish church."

[Sidenote: Scientific men begin to investigate the reports.]

5. Three French Academicians, one of whom was the afterwards renowned chemist Lavoisier, presented to the Academy in 1772 a report on the analysis of a stone said to have been seen to fall at Lucé on September 13, 1768. [Sidenote: Pane 4c.] As the identity of lightning with the electric spark had been recently established by Franklin, they were in advance convinced that "thunder-stones" existed only in the imagination; and never dreaming of the existence of a "sky-stone" which had no relation to a "thunder-stone," they somewhat easily assured both themselves and the Academy that there was nothing unusual in the mineralogical characters of the Lucé specimen, their verdict being that the stone was an ordinary one which had been struck and altered by lightning.

[Sidenote: Chladni argues that the bodies come from outer space.]

6. In 1794 the German philosopher Chladni, famed for his researches into the laws of sound, brought together numerous accounts of the fall of bodies from the sky, and called the attention of the scientific world to the fact that several masses of iron, of which he specially considers two, had in all probability come from outer space to this planet.[4]

[Sidenote: The Pallas iron.]

[Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

One of them is the mass still known as the Pallas or Krasnojarsk iron.[5] This irregular mass, weighing about 1500 lbs., of which the greater part is in the Museum at St. Petersburg, was met with at Krasnojarsk by the traveller Pallas in the year 1772, and had been found in 1749 by a Cossack on the surface of the highest part of a lofty mountain between Krasnojarsk and Abakansk in Siberia, in the midst of a schistose district: it was regarded by the Tartars as a "holy thing fallen from heaven." The interior is composed of a ductile iron, which, though brittle at a high temperature, can be forged either cold or at a moderate heat; its large sponge-like pores are filled with an amber-coloured olivine; the texture is uniform, and the olivine equally distributed; a vitreous varnish had preserved it from rust. The fragment in the case, weighing about 7 lbs., was presented to the Trustees in 1776 by the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg.

[Sidenote: The Otumpa iron.]

[Sidenote: Separate stand.]

A second specimen referred to is that which in 1783 Don Michael Rubin de Celis was sent by the Viceroy of Rio de la Plata to investigate;[6] it had been found by Indians, searching for honey and wax, and trusting to rain for drink, projecting about a foot above the ground near a place called Otumpa, in the Gran Chaco Gualamba, South America, and was at first thought to be the outcrop of an iron vein. Don Rubin de Celis estimated the weight of this mass of malleable iron at thirty thousand pounds, and reported that for a hundred leagues around there were neither iron mines nor mountains nor even the smallest stones, and that owing to the absence of water, there was not a single fixed habitation in the country. There were several smaller masses at the locality; one of them, weighing 1400 lbs., is shown on a separate stand in the Pavilion: according to Sir Woodbine Parish, who presented it to the Museum in 1826, it had been removed to Buenos Ayres at the beginning of the struggle for Independence; it was a complimentary gift to Sir Woodbine on the occasion of his being sent by Canning to acknowledge the Independence of the State. A slice of this iron is shown in case 4c. [Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

[Sidenote: Chladni's arguments.]

7. Chladni argued that these masses could not have been formed in the wet way, for they had evidently been exposed to fire and slowly cooled: that the absence of scoriæ in the neighbourhood, the extremely hard and pitted crust, the ductility of the iron, and, in the case of the Siberian mass, the regular distribution of the pores and olivine, precluded the idea that they could have been formed where found, whether by man, electricity, or an accidental conflagration: he was driven to conclude that they had been formed elsewhere, and projected thence to the places where they were discovered; and as no volcanoes had been known to eject masses of iron, and as, moreover, no volcanoes are met with in those regions, he held that the specimens referred to must have actually fallen from the sky. Further, he sought to show that the flight of a heavy body through the sky is the direct cause of the luminous phenomenon known as a fire-ball.

[Sidenote: The fall of stones at Siena, in Tuscany.]

[Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

8. About seven o'clock on the evening of June 16, 1794, as if to direct attention to Chladni's just published theory, there fell a shower of stones at Siena, in Tuscany.

The event is described in the following letter, dated Siena, July 12, 1794, from the Earl of Bristol to Sir William Hamilton, K.B., F.R.S., at that time British Envoy-Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at the Court of Naples:--[7]

"In the midst of a most violent thunderstorm, about a dozen stones of various weights and dimensions fell at the feet of different persons, men, women and children. The stones are of a quality not found in any part of the Siennese territory; they fell about 18 hours after the enormous eruption of Mount Vesuvius: which circumstance leaves a choice of difficulties in the solution of this extraordinary phenomenon. Either these stones have been generated in this igneous mass of clouds which produced such unusual thunder, or, which is equally incredible, they were thrown from Vesuvius, at a distance of at least 250 miles: judge, then, of its parabola. The philosophers here incline to the first solution. I wish much, Sir, to know your sentiments. My first objection was to the fact itself, but of this there are so many eyewitnesses, it seems impossible to withstand their evidence."

[Sidenote: The fall of a stone near Wold Cottage, Yorkshire.]

[Sidenote: Pane 4b.]

9. Soon afterwards there fell a stone in England itself. About three o'clock in the afternoon of December 13, 1795, a labourer working near Wold Cottage, a few miles from Scarborough, in Yorkshire,[8] was terrified to see a stone fall about ten yards from where he was standing. The stone, weighing 56 lbs., was found to have gone through 12 inches of soil and 6 inches of solid chalk rock. No thunder, lightning, or luminous meteor accompanied the fall; but in the adjacent villages there was heard an explosion likened by the inhabitants to the firing of guns at sea, while in two of them the sounds were so distinct of something singular passing through the air towards Wold Cottage, that five or six people went to see if anything extraordinary had happened to the house or grounds. No stone presenting the same characters was known in the district. The stone is preserved in the Museum Collection.

[Sidenote: Terrestrial origin still sought for.]

10. It seemed to be now impossible for any one to doubt the fall of stones from the sky, but the reluctance of scientific men to grant an extra-terrestrial origin to them is shown by the theories referred to in the above letter to Sir William Hamilton, and is rendered even more evident by the theory proposed in 1796 by Edward King, who suggested that the stones had their origin in the condensation of a cloud of ashes, mixed with pyritical dust and numerous particles of iron, coming from some volcano. As the stones fell at Siena out of a cloud coming from the North, while Vesuvius is really to the South, he gravely suggested that in this case the cloud had been blown from the South past Siena, and had then before its condensation into stone been brought back by a change of wind. As to the fall of a stone near Wold Cottage, he was not prepared either to believe or disbelieve the witnesses until the matter had been more closely examined; but in case the statements should prove worthy of credit, he points out the possibility of the necessary dust-cloud having come from Mount Hecla in Iceland.

[Sidenote: The fall of stones near Benares, in India.]

[Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

11. Later came a well-authenticated account of a more wonderful event still. At 8 o'clock on the evening of December 19, 1798, many stones fell at Krakhut, 14 miles from Benares, in India; the sky was perfectly serene, not a cloud had been seen since December 11, and none was seen for many days after. According to the observations of several Europeans, as well as natives, in different parts of the country, the fall of the stones was preceded by the appearance of a _ball of fire_, which lasted for only a few instants, and was followed by an explosion resembling thunder.

[Sidenote: Examination of stones by Howard.]

12. Fragments of the stones of Siena, Wold Cottage, and Krakhut, as also of a stone said to have fallen on July 3, 1753, at Tabor, in Bohemia, came into the hands of Edward Howard, and the comparative results of a chemical and mineralogical investigation (the latter by the Count de Bournon) of the stones from the above four places are given in a paper read before the Royal Society of London, on February 25, 1802. Howard concludes as follows:--

[Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

"The mineralogical descriptions of the Lucé stone by the French Academicians, of the Ensisheim stone by M. Barthold, and of stones from the above four places (Siena, Wold Cottage, Krakhut and Tabor) by the Count de Bournon, all exhibit a striking conformity of character common to each of them, and I doubt not but the similarity of component parts, especially of the malleable alloy, together with the near approach of the constituent proportions of the earth contained in each of the four stones, will establish very strong evidence in favour of the assertion that they have fallen on our globe. They have been found at places very remote from each other, and at periods also sufficiently distant. The mineralogists who have examined them agree that they have no resemblance to mineral substances properly so called, nor have they been described by mineralogical authors."

[Sidenote: Could projectiles reach the earth from the moon?]

13. This paper aroused much interest in the scientific world, and, though Chladni's view that such stones come from outer space was still not generally accepted in France, it was there deemed more worthy of consideration after Poisson[9] (following Laplace) had shown that a body shot from the moon in the direction of the earth, with an initial velocity of 7592 feet a second, would not fall back upon the moon, but would actually, after a journey of sixty-four hours, reach the earth, upon which, neglecting the resistance of the air, it would fall with a velocity of about 31,508 feet a second.

[Sidenote: The fall of stones at L'Aigle, in France.]

[Sidenote: Pane 4c.]

14. Whilst the minds of the scientific men of France were in this unsettled condition, there came a report that still another shower of stones had fallen, this time in their own country, and within easy reach of Paris. To settle the matter finally, if possible, the physicist Biot, Member of the French Academy, was directed by the Minister of the Interior to inquire into the event upon the spot. After a careful examination of the stones and a comparison of the statements of the villagers, Biot[10] was convinced that--

1. On Tuesday, April 26, 1803, about 1 P.M., there was a noise as of a violent _explosion_ in the neighbourhood of L'Aigle, in the department of Orne, followed by a rolling sound which lasted for five or six minutes: the noise was heard for a distance of 75 miles round.

2. Some moments before the explosion at L'Aigle, a _fire-ball_ in quick motion was seen from several of the adjoining towns, though not from L'Aigle itself.

3. There was absolutely no doubt that on the same day _many stones fell_ in the neighbourhood of L'Aigle.

Biot estimated the number of the stones at two or three thousand; they fell within an ellipse of which the larger axis was 6·2 miles, and the smaller 2·5 miles; and this inequality might indicate not a single explosion but a series of them. With the exception of a few little clouds of ordinary character, the sky was quite clear.

The exhaustive report of Biot, and the completeness of his proofs, compelled the whole of the scientific world to recognise the fall of stones on the earth from outer space as an undoubted fact.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The times and places of fall are independent of terrestrial circumstances.]

15. Since that date many falls have been observed, and the attendant phenomena have been carefully investigated. These observations teach us that _meteorites_, as they are now called, fall at all times of the day and night, and at all seasons of the year, while they favour no particular latitudes: also they are found to be quite independent of the weather, and in many cases have fallen when the sky has been perfectly clear; even where stones have fallen in what has been called a thunder-storm, we may reasonably suppose that in most cases the luminous phenomenon has been mistaken for a variety of lightning, and the loud noise for thunder.

[Sidenote: Velocity of meteorites.]

16. From observations of the path and the time of flight of the luminous meteor, it is calculated that meteorites enter the earth's atmosphere with absolute velocities ranging from 10 to 45 miles a second: the velocity actually observed is that relative to a person at rest on the earth's surface; for the determination of the absolute velocity of the meteorite, the motion of the observer with the earth (about 18 miles a second) must be allowed for. Let us attempt to follow the course of a small compact body moving at such a rate. So long as the body is traversing "empty space," the only heat it receives is that sent direct from the sun and stars; in general, the meteorite will thus be probably very cold, and, owing to its small size and want of luminosity, it will be invisible to an observer on the earth's surface. After the meteorite enters the earth's atmosphere a very speedy change must take place. [Sidenote: The resistance of the air.] Assuming the law of resistance of the air for a planetary velocity to be the same as that deduced from experiments with artillery, the astronomer Schiaparelli[11] has shown that if a ball of 8 inches diameter and 32-1/3 lbs. weight enter the atmosphere with a velocity of 44-3/4 miles a second, its velocity on arriving at a point where the barometric pressure is still only 1/760th of that at the earth's surface will have been already reduced to 3-1/6 miles a second. From this it is clear that the speed of the meteorite after the whole of the atmosphere has been traversed will be extremely small, and comparable with that of an ordinary falling body. From experiments made by Professor A. S. Herschel, it has been calculated that the velocity of the meteorite which fell at Middlesbrough, in Yorkshire, on March 14, 1881, was, on striking the ground, only 412 feet a second. From the depth of the hole (20 to 24 inches) made in stiff loam by the stone which fell at Hvittis, in Finland, on October 21, 1901, it has been estimated by Mr. Borgström that the meteorite had a velocity of 584 feet a second when it reached the earth. He further calculates that the stone would have acquired virtually the same velocity if it had been merely allowed to fall, from a position of rest, under the action of gravity, through an infinite atmosphere having the same density as at the earth's surface. In the case of the Hessle fall, several stones fell on the ice, which was only a few inches thick, and rebounded without either breaking the ice or being broken themselves.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the energy.]

17. Further, Schiaparelli pointed out that, in the case imagined by him, the energy already converted into heat would be sufficient to raise 198,400 pounds of water from freezing point to boiling point under the ordinary barometric pressure. The greater part of this heat is, no doubt, carried off by the air through which the meteorite passes; but still the wonder is, not that a meteorite is small on reaching the earth's surface, but that any of it is left to "tell the tale."

[Sidenote: The cloud, ball of fire and trail.]

This sudden generation of heat will cause fusion, and even luminosity, of the outer material of the meteorite, and in some cases a combustion of some of its constituents: the products of the thermal and mechanical action sufficiently account for the _cloud_ from which the meteorite is generally seen to emerge as a ball of fire, and also for the visible trail often left behind. The ball of fire has often an apparent diameter larger even than that of the moon, and is sometimes too bright for the eye to gaze upon.

[Sidenote: The meteorite is only luminous in the first part of its flight through the air.]

18. Owing to the quick reduction of speed, the luminosity will be a feature of the higher, not the lower, part of the course. The Orgueil meteorite of May 14, 1864, was so high when luminous that, notwithstanding its almost easterly motion, it was seen over a space of country ranging from the Pyrenees to the north of Paris, a distance of more than 300 miles.

[Sidenote: The time of flight through the air is very brief.]

19. Next we may remark that the time of flight in the earth's atmosphere will be very short, and reckoned only by seconds. Even when the meteorite is wholly metallic, if we may judge from the time one end of a poker may be held in the hand whilst the other end is in the fire, the heat will not have had time to get far below the surface before the body will have reached the ground. [Sidenote: Pane 4d.]

[Sidenote: The crust.]

As a matter of fact, meteorites are almost invariably found to be covered with a _crust_ or varnish, such as would be caused by strong heating, and its thinness shows the slight depth to which the heat has had time to penetrate; in the case of the stones, the greater part of the suddenly heated superficial material must chip off and be left behind at all parts of the track of the meteor. The aspect of the crust varies according to the mineral constitution of the meteorites: it is generally black, and in most cases dull, as in High Possil, Zsadány and Orgueil, [Sidenote: Pane 4d.] but sometimes shiny, as in Stannern, or partly dull and partly shiny, as in Dyalpur; rarely, it is of a dark grey colour, as in Mezö-Madaras and some of the stones which fell in the neighbourhood of Mocs. In the case of the Pultusk meteorite of January 30, 1868, several thousands of stones, [Sidenote: Panes 4efg.] varying from the size of a man's head to that of a small nut, were picked up, each covered with a crust: fifty-six of the stones of this fall are shown in the case.

[Sidenote: The crust.]

20. The crust is not of equal thickness at every point; for, the form of the meteorite being a result of oft-repeated fracture, the constantly changing surface must be very irregular, and its different parts must be heated to different temperatures and be exposed to different amounts of mechanical action. Sometimes, owing to the motion of the meteorite through the air, the crust is so marked as to indicate the position of the meteorite in regard to its line of motion at a certain part of its course; and this relation is rendered more clear in some cases by evidence that melted material has been driven to the back of the moving mass. The Nedagolla iron and the Goalpara stone illustrate this peculiarity. [Sidenote: Pane 4h.]

[Sidenote: The pittings.]

21. Further, the surface of a meteorite is generally covered with _pittings_, which have been compared in form to thumb-marks: stones from the Supuhee, Futtehpur, [Sidenote: Pane 4h.] and Knyahinya falls present good examples of this character. It is remarkable that pittings bearing a close resemblance to those of meteorites have been observed on the large partially burned grains of gunpowder, which have been [Sidenote: Pane 4h.] picked up near the muzzle after the firing of the 35-ton and 80-ton guns at Woolwich. The pitting of the gunpowder grains is attributed to unequal combustion, but that of meteorites seems to be due not so much to inequality of combustibility as to that of conductivity, fusibility and frangibility of the matter at the surface.

[Sidenote: Fragmentary form of meteorites.]

22. As picked up, complete and covered with crust, meteorites are not spherical, nor have they any definite shape: in fact, they are always irregular angular fragments, such as would be obtained on breaking up a rock presenting no regularity of structure.

[Sidenote: Pane 4h.]