A CENTURY OF THE STUDY OF METEORITES. 



Bv Dr. Oliver C. Farrington, 



Curator of Geology, Field Columbian Museum. 



The close of the nineteenth century aviII mark the end of the first 

 centuiT of the .stud}'^ of meteorites. Up to the beginning of this 

 century the attitude of scientific men toward the accounts of stones 

 reported to have fallen from the sk}^ was in general one of scorn and 

 incredulity. Thus an account prepared with great care by the munici- 

 pality of Juillac, France, telling of a stone shower which occurred 

 there in Jul\^, 1790, was characterized by Berthelon at the time as "a 

 recital, evidently false, of a phenomenon physicall}' impossible" and 

 "'calculated to excite the pity not only of physicists but of all reason- 

 al)le people." Bonn, in his Lithophylacium Bonnianum, refers to the 

 Tabor, Bohemia, meteorite which fell in 1753, as '^e coelo pluvisse 

 creduliores quidam asseverant." Chladni, writing in the earl}^ part of 

 the century, speaks of many meteorites which were thrown away in his 

 day because the directors of museums were ashamed to exhiliit stones 

 reported to have fallen from the sky. President Jefferson when told 

 that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a shower of stones 

 as having taken place at Weston, Connecticut, in 1807, said: ""It is 

 easier to believe that two Y^ankee professors will lie than to believe 

 that stones will fall from heaven." 



The change of opinion on the part of intelligent and especially sci- 

 entific men, which took place at the beginning of this century, was due 

 largely to the investigation by the French Academy of the shower of 

 stones which fell at L'Aigle in 1803. This investigation established 

 so absolutely the fact of the fall to the earth at L'Aigle of stones from 

 outer space that scientific men were logically compelled to give credence 

 to the reports of similar occurrences elsewhere. Further, the papers 

 of Chladni and Howard published about the same time, strenuously 

 urging that other masses reported to have fallen upon the earth could 

 not, because of their structure and composition, be of terrestrial ori- 

 gin, had much to do with fixing the growing faith that solid cosmic 



"Eeprintcd by perinisf^ioii from Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LVII, February, 

 1901. 



SM 15^*01 13 193 



