METEOBIC STONES. 215 



selves, agrees most harmoniously with the conclusion to 

 which the narratives above analyzed force our assent, and 

 greatly strengthens that conclusion, it also leads to a further 

 knowledge of the subject, than the mere external evidence 

 could of itself have afforded us. 



The reports from all those who observed the meteors, and 

 found the stones in the neighbourhood, after the explosions, 

 agree in describing those substances as different from all the 

 surrounding bodies, and as presenting, in every case, the 

 same external appearance of semi-metallic matter, coated on 

 the outside with a thin black crust, and bearing strong marks 

 of recent fusion. This general resemblance we should be 

 perfectly entitled to infer from the various accounts of eye- 

 witnesses, even if no more particular observations had been 

 made by men of science, to whose inspection many of the 

 fallen bodies were submitted. But fortunately a considerable 

 number of these singular substances have been examined, 

 with the greatest care, by the first chemists and naturalists of 

 the age ; and their investigations have put us in possession of 

 a mass of information, capable of convincing the most 

 scrupulous inquirer that the bodies in question have a com- 

 mon origin, and that we are as yet wholly unacquainted with 

 any natural process which could have formed them on our 

 globe. 



M. De la Lande appears to have examined the stones which 

 fell near Bourg, in the province of Bresse, 1753, with some 

 attention He remarks their external coating of black vitri- 

 fied matter, the metallic or pyritical threads interspersed 

 through them, and more particularly the cracks filled with 

 metallic particles. His chemical analysis is very meagre and 

 unsatisfactory ; but such as it was, its results, as well as the 

 general observations of external character, corresponded with 

 the inferences drawn by him from a similar examination of 

 the stone which fell in 1750, near Coutances, in Normandy, 

 at the distance of three hundred and sixty miles from Bourg. 



The external appearance of the three stones presented to 

 the Academy of Sciences, as having fallen in different parts of 



