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strike the ground in a field near the canton called 

 Gisgaud, where it made a hole of more than five feet 

 deep. It was transported to the church as a mira- 

 culous object. The noise was heard so distinctly at 

 Lucerne, Yilling, and many other places, that in each 

 it was thought that some houses had fallen. King 

 Maximilian, who was then at Ensisheim, had the 

 stone carried to the castle, and after breaking off 

 two pieces, one for the Duke Sigismund of Austria, 

 and the other for himself, forbade further damage, 

 finally ordering the stone to be suspended in the 

 church." 



A still older stone, of which the history goes back far 

 beyond the seventh century, is reverenced by the Moslems as 

 one of their holiest relics, and is preserved at Mecca built 

 into the north-eastern corner of the wall of the Kaaba. The 

 late Paul Partsch, for many years Keeper of the Minerals in 

 the Imperial Museum of Vienna, considered that the meteoric 

 origin of this stone was sufficiently proved by information 

 which had been submitted to him. 



Three French Academicians, one of whom was the after- 

 wards renowned chemist Lavoisier, presented to the Academy 

 in 1772 a report on the analysis of a stone said to have been 

 seen to fall at Luce on September 13, 1768 (1 43 O). As the 

 identity of lightning with the electric spark had been recently 

 established by Franklin, they were in advance convinced 

 that ' thunder-stones ' existed only in the imagination ; and 

 never dreaming of the existence of a ' sky-stone - which 

 had no relation to a ( thunder-stone/ they somewhat easily 

 assured both themselves and the Academy that there was 

 nothing unusual in the mineralogical character of the Luce 

 specimen, their opinion being that it was an ordinary stone 

 which had been struck by lightning. 



In 1794 the German philosopher Chladni, famed for his 

 researches into the laws of sound, brought together numerous 

 accounts of falls from the sky, and called the attention of the 

 scientific world to the fact that several masses of iron, of which 

 he specially mentions two, had in all probability come from 

 outer space to this planet. 



