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three leagues from Pont-de-Vesle, a hissing sound was remarked; and at this place, as well as at Pontde-Vesle, a blackish mass found to have fallen in ploughed ground with such a force, as to penetrate half a foot into the soil. The largest of these bodies weighed 20 lib.; and they both alike appeared, on the surface, as if they had been exposed to a violent degree of heat. It may here be observed, that the small depth at which these bodies were found in the ploughed land, renders it in the highest degree improbable that they should have existed there previously to the time of the explosion. To the same purpose we may remark the complete resemblance of the two masses, found at so great a distance from each other. In the year 1768, no less than three stones were presented to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, all of which were said to have fallen in different parts of France; one in the Main, another in Artois, and the third in the Cotentin. These were all externally of the very same appearance; and Messrs. Fougeraux, Cadet, and Lavoisier, drew up a particular report upon the first of them. They state, that on the 18 of September 1768, between four and five o'clock in the evening, there was seen near the village of Lucè, a cloud in which a short explosion took place, followed by a hissing noise, without any flame; that some persons about three leagues from Luce, heard the same sound, and, looking upwards, perceived an opaque body which was describing a curve line in the air, and was about to fall upon a piece of green turf in the neighbouring high road; that they immediately ran to this place, and found a kind of stone, half buried in the earth, extremely

hot, and about 7 lib. weight. This account of the fact was communicated to the academicians by the Abbé Bachelay. But they do not appear to have attached much credit to the whole circumstances of his narrative; for they conclude (chiefly from several experiments made to analyse it) that the stone did not fall upon the earth, but was there before the thunder-clap, and was only heated and exposed to view by the stroke of the electrick fluid.

Of late years, the attention of philosophers has been more anxiously directed to this curious subject; and more accurate accounts of the supposed fall of stones have been collected from various quarters. It is not a little singular, that the narrative which, of all others, was supported by the very best and most direct evidence, was treated by naturalists near the spot with perverse incredulity; until the results of chemical analysis, about ten years after the thing happened, began to operate some change upon the common opinions relating to such matters. We allude to the shower of stones, which fell near Agen, 24th July 1790, between nine and ten o'clock at night. First, a bright ball of fire was seen traversing the atmosphere with great rapidity, and leaving behind it a train of light which lasted about fifty seconds; a loud explosion was then heard, accompanied with sparks, which flew of in all directions. This was followed, after a short interval, by a fall of stones, over a considerable extent of ground, at various distances from each other, and of different sizes; the greater number weighing about half a quarter of a pound, but many a vast deal more. Some fell with a hissing noise, and entered the

ground others (probably the smaller ones) fell without any sound, and remained on the surface. In appearance, they were all alike. The shower did no considerable damage; but it broke the tiles of some houses. All this was attested in a procès-verbal, signed by the magistrates of the municipality. It was farther substantiated by the testimony of above three hundred persons, inhabitants of the district; and various men of more than ordinary information gave the very same account to their scientifick correspondents. One of these (M. D'Arcet, son of the celebrated chemist of that name) mentions two additional circumstances, of great importance, from his own observation. The stones, when they fell upon the houses, had not the sound of hard and compact substances, but of matter in a soft, half-melted state; and such of them as fell upon straws, adhered to them, so as not to be easily separated. It is utterly impossible to reconcile these facts with any other supposition, than that of the stones having fallen from the air, and in a state of fusion. That they broke the roofs of houses, and were found above pieces of straw adhering to them, is the clearest of all proofs of their having fallen from above. Although nothing can be more pointed and specifick than this evidence, it yet derives great confirmation from the similar accounts which have still more recently been communicated. On the 18th December 1795, the weather being cloudy, several persons in the neighbourhood of Captain Topham's house, in Yorkshire, heard a loud noise in the air, followed by a hissing sound, and afterwards felt a shock, as if a heavy body had fallen to the ground at a little

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distance from them. One of these, a ploughman, saw a huge stone falling towards the earth, eight or nine yards from the place where he stood. It was seven or eight yards from the ground when he first observed it. It threw up the mould on every side, and buried itself twenty-one inches. This man assisted by others, who were near the spot at the same time, immediately raised the stone, and found that it weighed about 56 lib. These statements have been au thenticated by the signatures of the people who made them.

On the 17th March 1798 a body, burning very brightly, passed over the vicinity of Ville-Franche, on the Soane, accompanied with a hissing noise, and leaving a luminous track behind it. It exploded with great noise, about twelve hundred feet from the ground; and one of the shivers, still luminous, being observed to fall in a neighbouring vineyard, was traced. At that spot, a stone above a foot in diameter was found to have penetrated about twenty inches into the soil. It was sent to M. Sage, of the National Institute, accompanied by a narrative of the foregoing circumstances, under the hand of an intelligent eye-witness.

While these observations in Europe were daily confirming the original but long exploded idea of the vulgar, that many of the luminous meteors observed in our horizon are masses of ignited matter, an account of a phenomenon, precisely of the same description, was received from the East Indies, vouched by authority peculiarly well adapted to secure general respect. Mr. Williams, a member of the Royal Society of London, residing in Bengal, having heard of an explosion, accompanied by

a descent of stones, in the province of Bahar, made all possible inquiries into the circumstances of the phenomenon, among the Europeans who happened to be on the spot. He learnt, that on the 19th December 1798, at 8 o'clock P. M. a luminous meteor, like a large ball of fire, was seen at Benares, and in different parts of the country; that it was attended with a rumbling, loud noise; and that, about the same time, the inhabitants of Krakhut, fourteen miles from Benares, saw the light, heard a loud thunder-clap, and, immediate ly after, heard the noise of heavy bodies falling in their neighbourhood. Next morning, the fields were found to have been turned up in different spots, which was easily perceived, as the crop was not more than two or three inches above the ground; and stones of different sizes, but apparently of the same substances, were picked out of the moist soil, generally from a depth of six inches. As the occurrence took place in the night, and after the people had retired to rest, no one observed the meteor explode, or the stones fall; but the watchman of an English gentleman, who lived near Krakhut, brought him one next morning, which he said had fallen through the top of his hut, and buried itself in the earthen floor.

Several of the foregoing narratives mention the material circumstance, of damage done to interposed objects by the stones, supposed to have fallen on the earth. In one instance still more distinct traces were left of their progress through the air. During the explosion of a meteor, on the 20th August 1789, near Bourdeaux, a stone, about fifteen inches diameter, broke through the roof of a cottage, and killed a herdsman and

some cattle. Part of the stone is now in the museum of Mr. Greville, and the rest in that of Bourdeaux. It is singular that this fact is not mentioned by M. Izarn,' nor by Vauquelin, although he examined a specimen evidently taken from the same stone, and received a procès-verbal of the manner in which it fell. We take the account from Mr. Greville's paper, (Phil. Trans. 1803. part I.); and he appears to have received it from M. St. Amand, Professor of Natural History at the Central School of Agen.

It is quite impossible, we appre hend, to deny very great weight to all these testimonies; some of them given by intelligent eyewitnesses; others by people of less information, indeed, but prepossessed with no theory; all concurring in their descriptions; and examined by various persons of acuteness and respectability, immediately after the phenomena had been exhibited. Without offering any farther remarks, then, upon this mass of external evidence, we shall only remind our readers of the main points which it seems satisfactorily to substantiate. It proves, that, in various parts of the world, luminous meteors have been seen moving through the air, in a direction more or less oblique, accompanied by a noise, generally like the hissing of large shot, followed by explosion, and the fall of hard, stony, or semi-metallick masses, in a heated state. The hissing sound, so universally menfioned; the fact of stones being found, unlike all those in the neighbourhood, at the spots towards

* Des Pierres tombées du Ciel, ou Lithologie Atmospherique, &c. &c. Par Joseph Izarn, Professeur de Physique, &c. Paris, De la Lain, fils, An. XI (1803.) pp. 427, 8vo.

which the luminous body or its fragments were seen to move : the scattering or ploughing up of the soil at those spots, always in proportion to the size of the stones; the concussion of the neighbouring ground at the time; and, above all, the impinging of the stones upon bodies somewhat removed from the earth, or lying loose upon its surface-are circumstances perfectly well authenticated in these reports; and, when taken together, are obviously fatal to any theory, either of the masses having previously existed in the soil ready formed, and having been disclosed by the electrick fluid-or of their component parts having existed there, and having been united and consolidated by that fluid.

II. While the internal evidence on this question, that is, the inference arising from an examination of the stones themselves, agrees most harmoniously with the conclusion to which the narratives above analyzed force our assent, and greatly strengthens that conclusion, it also leads to a farther knowledge of the subject, than the mere external evidence could of itself have afforded us.

The reports from all those who observed the meteors, and found the stones in the neighbourhood, after the explosions, agree in describing those substances as different from all the surrounding bodies, and as presenting, in every case, the same external appearance of semi-metallick matter, coated on the outside with a thin black crust, and bearing strong marks of recent fusion. This general resemblance we should be perfectly entitled to infer from the various accounts of eye-witnesses, even if no more particular observations had been made by men of science,

to whose inspection many of the fallen bodies were submitted. But fortunately a considerable number of these singular substances have been examined, with the greatest care, by the first chemists and naturalists of the age; and their investigations have put us in possession of a mass of information, capable of convincing the most scrupulous inquirer, that the bodies in question have a common origin, and that we are as yet wholly unacquainted with any natural process which could have formed them on our globe.

M. De la Lande appears to have examined the stones which fell near Bourg, in the province of Bresse, 1753, with some attention. He remarks their external coating of black vitrified matter, the metallick or pyritical threads interspersed through them, and more particularly the cracks filled with metallick particles. His chemical

analysis is very meagre and unsatisfactory; but such as it was, its results, as well as the general observations of external character, corresponded with the inferences drawn by him from a similar examination of the stone which fell, in 1750, near Coutances, in Normandy, at the distance of three hundred and sixty miles from Bourg.

The external appearance of the three stones presented to the Academy of Sciences, as having fallen in different parts of France during the year 1768, was precisely the

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found to contain, of sulphur, 8 per cent.; iron, 36; vitrifiable earth, 55. It must be remarked, however, that this decomposition was effected by means of experiments performed upon an integral part of the whole stone, consider ed as a homogeneous substance; whereas, it is in fact a congeries of substances, which ought to have been separately analyzed. This consideration will, in part at least, enable us to account for the apparent discrepancy between the results obtained by the academicians and those of later experimentalists. Messrs. Lavoisier, &c. also examined particularly another stone, said to have fallen in a different part of France, and obtained very nearly the same results. The only difference was, that it did not give out sulphurated hydrogenous gas when acted upon by the muriatick acid; a peculiarity distinct ly observable in the other sub

stance.

The description which Professor Barthold gives of the external character of the stone which fell near Ensisheim, in the fifteenth century, corresponds exactly with the descriptions given of these stones, and of the ores examined by M. De la Lande. The results of his analysis are somewhat different; but he examined the whole heterogeneous compound, and not the parts separately. He concluded, that this mass contained 2 per cent. of sulphur, 20 of iron, 14 magnesia, 17 alumina, 2 lime, 42 silica. Mr. Howard has very justly remarked, that the Professor's own account of his experiments is at variance with the idea of lime being contained in the substance; and that he has given no sufficient proof of the existence of alumina. It is also to be observed, that from the exceptionable method of analy

sis pursued both by Barthold and the academicians, the metallick particles were not examined with sufficient precision. The specifick gravity of the stones examined by the academicians was to that of water, as 3535 to 1000. The specifick gravity of the stone of Ensisheim, as tried by Barthold, was 3233; that of the stone examined by Gassendi (who saw it fall) was 14, common marble being 11; and, taking the specifick gravity of marble to that of water, as 2716 to 1000, the specifick gravity of the stone observed by Gassendi will be to that of water as 3456 to 1000. So near a coincidence between observations, made at such a distance of time, upon these various substances, cannot fail to strike us as very remarkable, and to prepare us for that fuller demonstration of their identity, which was reserved for the labours of our countryman Mr. Howard.

This excellent philosopher has elucidated the subject of our present consideration, by a course of experiments, as interesting and instructive as any that the science of chemical analysis can boast of. He fortunately obtained specimens of the stones, which fell in several very distant quarters of the globe; the Benares, and in, Yorkshire (as we have already described); near Sienna, and in Bohemia, according to evidence not altogether so satisfactory, as that upon which the other narratives rest.

He began his inquiries, very judiciously, by a minute examination of the external mineralogical characters of these four substances; and in this part of his task he was indebted to the learning and expertness of the Count de Bournon. The substances were found to resemble each other very closely in their general appearances, and in

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