6 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS 
vehement in their denial of such origin. Even the famous chemist 
Lavoisier was one of a committee of three who presented to the French 
Academy in 1772 a report upon a stone, the fall of which was said to 
have occurred at Lucé four years previously. They recorded their 
opinion that the stone was an ordinary one which had been struck by 
lightning. It was, nevertheless, a true meteorite. 
Early in the year 1794 Professor Chladni, a renowned German 
physicist, published a thesis in which he collated many accounts of 
bodies which had been said to have fallen from the sky, discussed the 
nature of the bodies themselves and expressed the conviction that 
bodies could and did come to our earth from space. Chladni devoted 
particular attention to the iron-and-stone mass known as the ‘‘ Med- 
wedewa”’ meteorite and the iron mass known as Campo del Cielo. 
‘The former of these was first described by the traveler Pallas, who saw 
it in the year 1772 at the city of Krasnojarsk, Siberia. ‘The latter was 
found by Indians in the interior of Argentina, South America, and was 
first visited in the year 1783 by Don Michael Rubin de Celis, who 
calculated the weight of the mass to be 30,000 pounds. 
As if in direct confirmation of Chladni’s theory, a. shower of stones 
fell at Siena, Italy, on June 16, 1794, and the occurrence is thus de- 
scribed in connection with the account of an eruption of Vesuvius by 
Sir William Hamilton’: 
“T must here mention a very extraordinary circumstance indeed, that 
happened near Sienna in the Tuscan state, about 18 hours after the com- 
mencement of the late eruption at Vesuvius on the 15th of June, though that 
phenomenon may have no relation to the eruption; and which was com- 
municated to me in the following words by the Earl of Bristol, bishop of 
Derry, in a letter dated from Sienna, July 12th, 1794: ‘In the midst of a 
most violent thunder-storm, about a dozen stones of various weights and 
dimensions fell at the feet of different people, 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 Vesuvius, which 
circumstance leaves a choice of difficulties in the solution of this extraordi- 
nary phenomenon: either these stones have been generated in this igneous 
mass of clouds, which produced such unusual thunder, or, which is equally 
ineredible, they were thrown from Vesuvius at a distance of at least 250 
' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Abr. ed., 1809, 
vol. XVII, p. 503. 
