354 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



The last statement for example in Pliny's enumeration 

 appears to refer to meteorites ; but the remark about axes 

 may indicate that stone celts or hammer-heads are denoted 

 by his first class. The Cambridge authority, King, com- 

 pares the German word Donnerkeil for Thunderbolt ; and 

 a^ain with the word Bcstuli the Saxon "Beetle" which 

 means a mallet, and concludes that these names in general 

 refer to stone implements. 



And here we are confronted by a curious complication 

 in the history of the subject. Side by side with the fact 

 that stones fell from the sky, existed the belief that the 

 origin of a thing was indicated by its shape ; consequently 

 a celestial origin was ascribed to those stones whose shape 

 resembled that of a missile, and both stony concretions, 

 fossils such as echini, and stone celts were supposed to be 

 meteorites. It is difficult now to disentangle the evidence 

 of falls actually witnessed from that which is merely based 

 upon the shape of the stones to which many of the mediaeval 

 accounts relate. 



At the present day both Belemnites and the marcasite 

 nodules found in the chalk are popularly supposed to be 

 thunderbolts on account of their shape. 



Conrad Gesner in his book De Figuris Lapidum (1565) 

 describes the various stones which derive their names from 

 their real or supposed meteoric origin, the Ceraunias, the 

 Chelonitis, the Brontias, the Baetylus, and gives figures of 

 many. Some of these are obviously fossils, others are stone 

 implements ; his accurate description of some which he had 

 received as thunderstones from Kentman shows that they 

 are clearly the latter. But it is equally certain that some 

 of his words relate to real meteoric stones. He makes in 

 particular this interesting remark : " The stone which fell 

 from the sky in 1492 and is hung in the Church at Ensis- 

 heim and weighs 300 pounds (unless it has lost weight 

 owing to the many visitors who take away fragments of it) 

 has, I think, no particular shape " ; and he mentions that he 

 had actually received a piece of this stone. 



So much for the general evidence available about 300 

 years ago ; the last reference brings us to a time when stones 



