362 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



suspicious ; and, further, the witnesses were evidently so 

 scared that they hardly knew what they had seen. And 

 yet one cannot help feeling that the available evidence, if 

 acutely criticised, was sufficient to enable a scientific critic 

 to extract the truth from the mass of legfend in which it 

 was embedded ; and in fact this was actually done with 

 signal success by a writer whose work opens the last 

 chapter in the history of the belief in meteorites. 



The modern development of a scientific proof of the 

 existence of sky-stones, as distinct from terrestrial material 

 is no doubt familiar to many through Mr. Fletcher's admir- 

 able Introduction to the Study of Meteorites. At the risk 

 of considerable repetition I must give a brief sketch of the 

 meteoric events of the last decade of the eighteenth and the 

 first decade of the nineteenth century, with the object of 

 showing how the evidence was received by the critics of 

 that date, and how they were finally persuaded. The 

 chapter of proof really begins in the year 1 794, when the 

 German physicist Chladni wrote a very remarkable paper, 

 " Ueber den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und 

 anderer ihr ahnlicher Eisenmassen ". 



The traveller Pallas in 1772 saw in Siberia a great mass 

 of iron weighing about 1 500 pounds which had been dis- 

 covered by a Cossack at the top of a mountain near Krasno- 

 jarsk in Siberia. It was spoken of by the Tartars as a holy 

 thing fallen from heaven. There was nothing like it in 

 the neighbourhood and it was too large to have been trans- 

 ported to the mountain top by human agency. It was a 

 peculiar spongy-looking mass which strongly recalls Pliny's 

 description quoted above. 



Chladni argued that this iron had evidently been fused, 

 but not by man, electricity, or accidental fire, considering 

 the place where it was found ; there are no volcanoes any- 

 where in the neighbourhood ; therefore it must have fallen 

 from the sky. To the same origin he referred a huge mass 

 found by Indians at Otumpa far away in the Argentine 

 Desert of South America ; a mass which was at first sup- 

 posed to be an iron mine ; and he suggested that other 

 masses of native iron are also meteoric. 



