David Forbes — On Meteorites. 225 



the British Museum there can be seen a harpoon and rude knife 

 from the Esquimaux of Western Greenland, formed of pieces of 

 meteorites flattened out and fixed in bone handles. These were 

 obtained in 1819, by Captain, now General Sir Edward Sabine, to 

 whom the natives explained that the iron was partly broken off a 

 large mass and in part obtained by breaking up stones containing 

 fragments or globules of native iron disseminated in the mass, which 

 they then flattened out between two stones, in order to give them the 

 proper shape and edge. The meteoric origin of these specimens 

 was confirmed by the analysis of Mr. Brande. 



In historical times it appears that the Chinese were the first to 

 study meteoric phenomena, and their astronomical literature contains 

 a record of meteors observed during more than two thousand four 

 hundred years. Of this a translation has been made, embracing 

 observations made from the seventh century before Christ down to 

 the seventeenth century of the Christian era, which is now found of 

 great service to modern astronomers, and the completeness of which 

 may be appreciated when it is mentioned that no less than 1479 

 meteors are registered between the years 960 and 1270 of our era. 



The Greek and Eoman authors paid but little attention to the 

 observation or recording of natural phenomena, yet occasional men- 

 tion of meteoric falls is to be found in their writings. A shower of 

 aerolites is evidently intended by J^schylus, when, in 'Prometheus 

 Unbound,' he alludes to Jupiter drawing a cloud together, and cover- 

 ing the land with a shower of rounded stones instead of hail. Livy 

 mentions a shower of stones which fell on the Alban Mount near 

 Eome, about 654 years before Christ, in the reign of Tullus Hostilius. 

 Plutarch, in his life of Lysander, describes the appearance of a 

 meteor, about 405 years e.g., from which, at ^gos Potamos in the 

 Hellespont, near the modern town of Gallipoli, a stone fell, which 

 is also mentioned by the Elder Pliny as being visible in his time 

 (500 years later), when it was as large as a waggon, and had ex- 

 ternally the appearance of having been burnt. In the early part of 

 the Christian era and during the Middle Ages, at least in Europe, the 

 records of the fall of meteorites are extremely meagre, and only 

 some seventy falls are noted up to the year 1500, of which the only 

 one now preserved is that which fell at Ensisheim in Alsace, in 

 1492, in a wheat-field, of which an account was ordered to be drawn 

 up by the Emperor Maximilian. The stone itself, weighing 270 lbs., 

 remained 300 years hung up by a chain near the altar in the church 

 at Ensisheim, until the French Kevolution, when it was carried to 

 Colmar, and pieces broken from it, one of which is still in the 

 collection of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris ; the remainder was, 

 however, sent back to the church at Ensisheim, where it now remains. 



Notwithstanding the numbers of well-attested cases of meteoric 

 falls, it is strange to find these wonderful phenomena, as it were, 

 quite ignored by the astronomers and other learned men of the last 

 century ; and as a proof of the apathy evinced by those of France 

 in particular, it may be mentioned that on the occasion of the re- 

 markable and well -authenticated meteoric fall of the 13th September, 



VOL. IX.— NO. xcv. 15 



