AEROLITES. 



AEROLITES. 



through the mass, anil the black crust acts powerfully on the 

 magnet. 



The appearance of these bodies is not periodical, nor connected 

 with any particular state of the atmosphere, nor of the weather ; and 

 they have fallen in all climates, on every part of the earth, at all 

 seasons, in the night and in the day. 



Chladni has compiled a very copious catalogue of all recorded 

 instances, from the earliest times : of which twenty-seven are previous 

 to the Christian era ; thirty-five from the beginning of the first to the 

 end of the 14th century; eighty-nine from the beginning of the 

 15th to the date of the fall at L'Aigle at the beginning of the 

 present century. In 1837 M. Quetelet, of Brussels, published a 

 catalogue of remarkable meteors, and again in 1841. Mr. Henick, in 

 America, and M. Chasles, in France, also published lists in 1841. 

 The latest accounts have been published by Professor Baden Powell, 

 in the ' Transactions of the British Association,' since the year 1847. 

 Numerous as the instances are in which these phenomena have 

 been witnessed they can form but a small proportion of the whole 

 amount, when we compare the small extent of surface occupied by 

 those capable of keeping a record of such events, with the wide 

 expanse of the ocean, the vast uninhabited deserts, mountains, and 

 forests, and the countries possessed by savage nations. Many of 

 those which occur in the night must also escape observation even 

 in civilised countries. 



Among the more remarkable instances to be met with in ancient 

 authors, the following may be mentioned. Livy states that, in the 

 reign of Tullus Hostilius (about 654 B.C.), a shower of stones fell 

 on the Alban Mount, not far distant from Rome. Plutarch, in 

 the ' Life of Lysander,' describes a stone that fell at ^Egos Potami, 

 in the Hellespont, near the modern Gallipoli, about 405 B.C., which is 

 also mentioned by the elder Pliny ( ii. ), who says that it was to be 

 seen in his time, that is, five hundred years afterwards, and that it 

 was as large as a waggon, of a burnt colour, and its fall was accom- 

 panied by a meteor. It is also recorded in the ' Parian Chronicle.' 

 The mother of the gods was worshipped at Pessinus, in Galatia, under 

 the form of a stone, which was said to have fallen from heaven ; and 

 that stone, in consequence of a treaty with Attalus, king of Pergamus, 

 was solemnly brought to Rome by Publius Scipio Nasica, about 204 

 years B.C., and ^placed in the temple of Cybele. The sun was 

 worshipped at Emesa, in Syria, under the form of a large, conical, 

 Mack stone, which, as the people about the temple reported, fell upon 

 the earth. It was afterwards brought with great pomp to Rome by 

 Elagabalus, who had been high-priest of the temple ; and the descrip- 

 tion of it, given by Herodian (v. ), accords with the appearance of. 

 a meteoric stone. In China records exist of occurrences of this 

 kind during a period of 2400 years. These were translated by M. 

 Priot ; and to give an instance of the nature of these records we may 

 state that between the years A.D. 960 to 1270 no less than 1479 

 meteors are registered. Of course these were not all aerolites. The 

 great stone at Cholula in America was asserted by the Mexicans to 

 have fallen from heaven. 



One of the cases of more modern date, most circumstantially 

 described, is that of the stone which fell at Ensisheim, in Alsace, 

 in 1492. The emperor Maximilian being there at the time, ordered 

 an account of the event to be drawn up. It weighed 270 pounds ; 

 and was afterwards suspended by a chain in the church at Ensisheim 

 for three centuries. During the French Revolution, it was carried off 

 to Colmar, and many pieces were broken from it. One of these is in 

 the museum at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris ; it is identical in 

 composition with other meteoric stones, and contains native or 

 malleable iron. What remained of the precious relic has since 

 been restored to the good people of Ensisheim, and it -now stands 

 near the great altar hi their church. 



Besides afrolites properly so called, masses of malleable iron, often 

 of vast size, have been found in situations, which, together with their 

 composition, leave no doubt as to their being of meteoric origin. An 

 iiiniiciixe mass, seen by Pallas in Siberia, which forms the subject of 

 Chladui's tract in 1794 above alluded to, was found quite insulated, 

 at a great elevation on a mountain of slate near the river Yeuesei, 

 removed from everything that could excite suspicion of its being a 

 production of art, and totally different from any ore of iron seen either 

 before or since that time. The tradition was, that it had fallen from 

 heaven, and, as such, was held in veneration by the Tartars ; but it 

 was removed in 1749 to the neighbouring town of Krasnoyarsk by 

 tlie inspector of the iron mines there. The mass, which weighed 

 about 1400 Ibs., was of an irregular form, not solid, but cellular like a 

 f|iungfl, the cells containing small granular bodies of a glassy nature, 

 afterwards found to be the simple mineral olivine, so common in 

 basalt. The iron was tough and malleable, and, according to the 

 analysis of Howard, yielded 17 per cent of nickel; but Klaproth and 

 John found a much smaller proportion of nickel, and Laugier found, 

 by another analysis, silica, magnesia, sulphur, and chrome. The 

 disagreement of such skilful operators shows that the mass was not 

 uniform in its composition. Another vast mass of meteoric iron was 

 found in South America, in the jurisdiction of Santiago del Estero, 

 about 500 miles north-west from Buenos Ayres, and is described in 

 a memoir in the Spanish language, printed in the 'Philosophical 

 Transactions' for 1788, by Don Rubin de Celis, who was sent by the 



JfAT. HIST. DIV. VOL. I. 



governor of the province to examine it. It lay in a vast plain of 

 above 100 leagues in extent, half sunk in the ground, and the size was 

 such as, estimating it by the specific gravity of iron, would give a 

 weight of more than 13 tons. According to the analysis of Proust 

 and of Howard, it contains 90 per cent, of iron, and 10 of nickel. 

 Specimens of this mass, which were sent to the Royal Society by Don 

 Rubin de Celis, are in the collection of the British Museum. A mass 

 of meteoric iron at the Cape of Good Hope, mentioned by Barrow in 

 his 'Travels in Africa,' as an artificial production, is described by 

 Van Marum in the 'Haarlem Transactions," a large portion of it having 

 been sent to the public museum there by the governor of the colony. 

 The mass, when found, was equal to about 177 Ibs., but much had 

 been carried away. The specific gravity is 7'604. Tennant found it to 

 contain I'lO per cent, of nickel, and a trace of carbon, and Stromeyer 

 detected cobalt in it, which last metal has also been found by Dr. 

 Turner in some meteoric iron from Buenos Ayres. Another mass 

 was found in Brazil, about 50 leagues from Bahia, the weight of 

 which was estimated at 14,000 Ibs. ; a fragment of this, analysed by 

 Dr. Wollaston, yielded 4 per cent, of nickel. Many other instances of 

 similar masses of iron might be mentioned, which are evidently of 

 meteoric origin ; but the only instance on record of iron having been 

 actually seen to fall from the atmosphere, is that which took place at 

 Agram, in Croatia, in 1751. On the 26th of May, about six o'clock in 

 the evening, the sky being quite clear, there was seen a ball of fire, 

 which shot along with a hollow noise from west to east, and after a 

 loud explosion, accompanied by a great smoke, two masses of iron fell 

 from it, in the form of chains welded together. 



Aerolites and meteoric iron are not the only products of meteors 

 which have fallen upon the earth after explosion. Numerous instances 

 are mentioned of black and red dust, which has covered great tracts 

 of land ; and it is remarkable that such dust has generally been found 

 to contain small angular grains resembling augite. There have also 

 been cases of the fall of a soft gelatinous matter of a red colour like 

 coagulated blood, which have given rise to the stories of the sky 

 having rained blood. Such appearances have not unfrequently 

 accompanied the fall of stones. On the 15th November, 1775, rain of 

 a red colour fell around Ulm and the Lake of Constance, and on the 

 same day in Russia and Sweden. The red water was of an acid taste, 

 probably from the presence of sulphuric acid ; and the precipitate, 

 which was flaky like snow, when dried, was attracted by the magnet. 

 In the night of the 5th March, 1803, a red dust, in some places 

 accompanied by rain, fell in different parts of Italy. In Apulia, there 

 was first a very high wind with much noise, and then a reddish-black 

 cloud appeared coming from the south-east, from which there fell a 

 yellowish-red rain, and afterwards a quantity of red dust. It 

 continued the whole of the following day and part of the succeeding ; 

 the dust was examined, and was not found to be volcanic. Fabroni, in 

 the 'Annales de Chimie,' torn. Ixxxiii, says, that near Arezzo, in 

 March, 1813, the ground being then covered with snow, there was a 

 shower of fresh snow of a red colour, which continued for many 

 hours, accompanied the whole time with a sound like that of the 

 violent dashing of waves at a distance ; the greatest fall was accom- 

 panied with two or three explosions like thunder. The red snow 

 being melted, a precipitate was obtained of a nankeen colour, which 

 yielded silica, lime, alumina, iron, and manganese. 



The origin of this remarkable class of natural phenomena is 

 involved in great obscurity, and many different theories have been 

 proposed to account for them. By some they have been supposed to 

 be bodies ejected from distant volcanoes belonging to our earth, a 

 conjecture which is refuted by every circumstance connected with 

 them. No substance in the least resembling aerolites has ever been 

 found in or near any volcano ; they fall from a height to which no 

 volcano can be supposed to have projected them, far less to have given 

 them the horizontal direction in which meteors invariably move for a 

 considerable part of their course. Another hypothesis is, that 

 meteoric bodies are formed in the atmosphere, which is equally 

 untenable ; for, in the first place, there is no ground for supposing, 

 from any discoveries yet made in chemistry, that the elements of 

 which they are composed exist in the atmosphere ; and even if they 

 did, the enormity of the volume of the atmosphere, attenuated as it 

 is at the great height from which the meteors fall, which would be 

 required to produce a solid mass of iron of thirteen tons weight, 

 places the conjecture beyond all credibility. A third hypothesis is, 

 that they are bodies thrown out by the volcanoes which are known to 

 exist in the moon, with such force as to bring them within the sphere 

 of the earth's attraction. This hypothesis was so far entertained by 

 Laplace, that he calculated the degree of lunar volcanic force that 

 would be necessary for this purpose. He calculated that a body 

 projected from the moon with a velocity of 7771 feet in the first 

 second would reach our earth in about two days and a half; but 

 Olbers and other astronomers are of opinion that the velocity of the 

 meteors, which has been estimated in some cases to be at first equal 

 to some miles in a second, is too great to admit of the possibility of 

 their having come from the moon. The theory which is most 

 consistent with all known facts and laws of nature is that proposed by 

 Chladni, namely, that the meteors are bodies moving in space, either 

 accumulations of matter as originally created, or fragments separated 

 from a larger mass of a similar nature. This opinion has also been 



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