210 Aerolites. 
_of some important public event, or national calamity, the 
precise date of each descent was carefully recorded. In 
China, for example, such reports reach back to the year 
644 before our era; and M. Biot has fownd in the astrono- 
mical section of some of the most ancient annals of that 
empire sixteen falls of aérolites, recorded as having taken 
place between the years 644 B.C. and 333 after Christ, whilst 
the Greek and Roman authors mention only four such 
occurrences during the same period. Even now, in this age 
of science and universal knowledge, aérolites can scarcely 
be regarded without a certain degree of dread. Indeed, 
four or five cases have occurred in which persons have been 
killed by them; in another instance, several villages in 
India were set on fire by the fall of a meteoric stone; and 
it is by no means a pleasant subject for reflection, that such 
a catastrophe might happen anywhere, and at any moment, 
especially when we remember that these stones, although 
not quite incandescent, are always, more or less, in a heated 
state; and sometimes so hot that even after the lapse of 
six hours they could not be touched with impunity. 
The first fall of meteoric stones on record appears to 
have taken place about the year 654 B.C., when, according 
to a passage in Livy, a shower of stones fell on the Alban 
Hill, not far distant from Rome. The next in chronologi- 
cal order is mentioned by several writers, such as Diogenes 
of Apollonia, Plutarch, and Pliny, and described by them 
as a great stone, the size of two millstones, and equal in 
weight to a full waggon-load. It fell about the year 467 
B.C., at A?gos Potamos, on the Hellespont; and even up to 
the days of Pliny, four centuries after its fall, it continued 
to bean object of curiosity and speculation. After the 
close of the first century we fail to obtain any account or 
notice of this stone; but although it has been lost sight of 
for upwards of eighteen hundred years, the eminent Hum- 
boldt says, in one of his works, that notwithstanding all 
previous failures to re-discover it, he does not wholly relin- 
quish the hope that even after such a considerable lapse of 
time, this Thracian meteoric mass, which it would be so 
difficult to destroy, may be found again, especially since 
the region in which it fell has now become so easy of access 
to European travellers. 
The next descent of any particular importance took 
place at Ensisheim in Alsace, where an aérolite fell on 
November 7th, 1492, just at the time when the Emperor 
Maximilian, then King of the Romans, happened to be on 
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