214 METEORIC STONES. 



although he examined a specimen evidently taken from the 

 same stone, and received a proces-verbal of the manner in 

 which it fell. We take the account from Mr. Greville's paper 

 (Phil. Trans. 1803, part I.) ; and he appears to have received 

 it from M. St. Amand, Professor of Natural History at the 

 Central School of Agen. 



It is quite impossible, we apprehend, to deny very great 

 weight to all these testimonies ; some of them given by intel- 

 ligent eyewitnesses; others by people of less information, 

 indeed, but prepossessed with no theory ; all concurring in 

 their descriptions, and examined by various persons of acute- 

 ness and respectability, immediately after the phenomena had 

 been exhibited. Without offering any further remarks, then, 

 upon this mass of external evidence, we shall only remind 

 the reader of the main points which it seems satisfactorily to 

 substantiate. It proves, that, in various parts of the world, 

 luminous meteors have been seen moving through the air, in 

 a direction more or less oblique, accompanied by a noise, 

 generally like the hissing of large shot, followed by explosion, 

 and the fall of hard, stony, or semi-metallic masses, in a 

 heated state. The hissing sound, so universally mentioned ; 

 the fact of stones being found, unlike those in the neighbour- 

 hood, at the spots towards which the luminous body or its 

 fragments were seen to move ; the scattering or ploughing up 

 of the soil at those spots, always in proportion to the size of 

 the stones ; the concussion of the neighbouring ground at the 

 time ; and, above all, the impinging of the stones upon bodies 

 somewhat removed from the earth, or lying loose upon its 

 surface are circumstances perfectly well authenticated in 

 these reports ; and, when taken together, are obviously fatal 

 to any theory, either of the masses having previously existed 

 in the soil ready formed, and having been disclosed by the 

 the electric fluid or of their component parts having ex- 

 isted there, and having been united and consolidated by that 

 fluid. 



II. While the internal evidence on this question, that is, 

 the inference arising from an examination of the stones them- 



