An Introduction to the Study of Meteorites / With a List of the Meteorites Represented in the Collection

by British Museum . Department of Mineralogy; L. Fletcher

3. These falls from the sky, when credited at all, have been deemed prodigies or miracles, and the stones have been regarded as objects for reverence and worship. It has even been conjectured that the worship of such stones was the earliest form of idolatry. The Phrygian stone, mentioned above, was worshipped at Pessinus by the Phrygians and Phœnicians as Cybele, "the mother of the gods," and its transference to Rome followed the announcement by an oracle that possession of the stone would secure to the State a continual increase of prosperity. Similarly, the Diana of the Ephesians, "which fell down from Jupiter," and the image of Venus at Cyprus, appear to have been, not statues, but conical or pyramidal stones. A stone, of which the history goes back far beyond the seventh century, is still revered by the Moslems as one of their holiest relics, and is preserved at Mecca built into the northeastern corner of the Kaaba. The late Paul Partsch,[2] for many years Keeper of Minerals in the Imperial Museum of Vienna, considered that the meteoric origin of the Kaaba stone was sufficiently proved by descriptions which had been submitted to him. A stone which fell in Japan in Pane 4c. the year 1741, and was presented to the British Museum in 1883, had long been made an annual offering in a temple of Ogi at one of the Japanese religious festivals. It may be added that a stone which lately fell in India[3] was decked with flowers, daily anointed with ghee (clarified butter), and subjected to frequent ceremonial worship and coatings of sandal-wood powder. The stone was placed on a terrace constructed for it at the place where it struck the ground, and a subscription was made for the erection of a shrine.

The oldest undoubted meteoric stone still preserved.

Pane 4c.

4. The oldest undoubted sky-stone still preserved is that which was long suspended by a chain from the vault of the choir of the parish church of Ensisheim in Elsass, and is now kept in the Rathhaus of that town. The following is a translated extract from a document which was preserved in the church:—

"On the 16th of November, 1492, a singular miracle happened: for between 11 and 12 in the forenoon, with a loud crash of thunder and a prolonged noise heard afar off, there fell in the town of Ensisheim a stone weighing 260 pounds. It was seen by a child to strike the ground in a field near the canton called Gisgaud, where it made a hole more than five feet deep. It was taken to the church as being a miraculous object. The noise was heard so distinctly at Lucerne, Villing, and many other places, that in each of them it was thought that some houses had fallen. King Maximilian, who was then at Ensisheim, had the stone carried to the castle: after breaking off two pieces, one for the Duke Sigismund of Austria and the other for himself, he forbade further damage, and ordered the stone to be suspended in the parish church."

Scientific men begin to investigate the reports.

5. Three French Academicians, one of whom was the afterwards 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 Lucé on September 13, 1768. As Pane 4c. 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 characters of the Lucé specimen, their verdict being that the stone was an ordinary one which had been struck and altered by lightning.

Chladni argues that the bodies come from outer space.

6. In 1794 the German philosopher Chladni, famed for his researches into the laws of sound, brought together numerous accounts of the fall of bodies from the sky, and called the attention of the scientific world to the fact that several masses of iron, of which he specially considers two, had in all probability come from outer space to this planet.[4]

The Pallas iron.