117 



One of these is the now famous mass known as the Pallas- 

 iron (1 22 K). This irregular mass, weighing 1 5 OOlbs., of which 

 the greater part is now in the Museum at St. Petersburg, was 

 met with at Krasnojarsk by the traveller Pallas in the year 

 1772, and had been found on the surface of Mount Kemirs, 

 between Krasnojarsk and Abekansk in Siberia, in the midst of 

 schistose mountains : it was regarded by the Tartars as a 

 ' holy thing fallen from heaven/ The interior is composed of 

 a ductile iron, which, though brittle at a high temperature, can 

 be forged either cold or at a moderate heat : its large sponge- 

 like pores are filled with an amber- coloured' olivine : the 

 texture is uniform, and the olivine equally distributed : a 

 vitreous varnish preserved it from rust. 



A second specimen referred to is that which in 1783 Don 

 Rubin de Celis was sent to investigate ; it had been found 

 by Indians, roving across the desert to the forests beyond in 

 search of honey and wax and trusting to rain for drink, in 

 the Gran Chaco Gualamba, near Otumpa, in the province of 

 Tucuman, South America (No. 2), and was at first thought to 

 be an iron mine. Don Rubin de Celis estimated the weight 

 of this mass of malleable iron at thirty thousand pounds, and 

 reported that for a hundred leagues around there were neither 

 iron mines nor mountains nor even the smallest stones, while 

 from want of water the district was uninhabited. A specimen 

 (weighing 1400 lbs.) of the iron of this locality is placed on 

 a marble pedestal in the Pavilion. 



Chladni argued that these masses could not have been 

 formed in the wet way, for they had evidently been exposed 

 to fire and slowly cooled : that the absence of scorise in the 

 neighbourhood, the extremely hard and pitted crust, the 

 ductility of the iron, and, in the case of the Siberian mass, 

 the regular distribution of the pores and olivine, precluded 

 the theory that they could have been formed where found, 

 whether by man, electricity, or an accidental conflagration : 

 he was driven to conclude that they had both been formed else- 

 where and projected to the places where they were discovered ; 

 and as no volcanoes had been known to eject masses of iron, 

 and as, moreover, no volcanoes are to be met with in those 

 regions, he held that the specimens referred to must have 



