fi 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 Luce 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 skv, 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 Krasnoyarsk, 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 Cell's, who 

 calculated the weight of the mass to be .'50,(100 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 1 : 



*' I 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 I -"> 1 1 1 of •bmc. 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 

 Deny, 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 arc 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 

 incredible, they were thrown from Vesuvius at a distance of at least 250 



1 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Abr, ed., 1809, 

 vol. XVII, p. 503. 



