Pane 4c.
One of them is the mass still known as the Pallas or Krasnojarsk iron.[5] This irregular mass, weighing about 1500 lbs., of which the greater part is in the Museum at St. Petersburg, was met with at Krasnojarsk by the traveller Pallas in the year 1772, and had been found in 1749 by a Cossack on the surface of the highest part of a lofty mountain between Krasnojarsk and Abakansk in Siberia, in the midst of a schistose district: 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 had preserved it from rust. The fragment in the case, weighing about 7 lbs., was presented to the Trustees in 1776 by the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg.
The Otumpa iron.
Separate stand.
A second specimen referred to is that which in 1783 Don Michael Rubin de Celis was sent by the Viceroy of Rio de la Plata to investigate;[6] it had been found by Indians, searching for honey and wax, and trusting to rain for drink, projecting about a foot above the ground near a place called Otumpa, in the Gran Chaco Gualamba, South America, and was at first thought to be the outcrop of an iron vein. 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, and that owing to the absence of water, there was not a single fixed habitation in the country. There were several smaller masses at the locality; one of them, weighing 1400 lbs., is shown on a separate stand in the Pavilion: according to Sir Woodbine Parish, who presented it to the Museum in 1826, it had been removed to Buenos Ayres at the beginning of the struggle for Independence; it was a complimentary gift to Sir Woodbine on the occasion of his being sent by Canning to acknowledge the Independence of the State. Pane 4c.A slice of this iron is shown in case 4c.
Chladni's arguments.
7. 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 scoriæ 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 idea that they could have been formed where found, whether by man, electricity, or an accidental conflagration: he was driven to conclude that they had been formed elsewhere, and projected thence 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 met with in those regions, he held that the specimens referred to must have actually fallen from the sky. Further, he sought to show that the flight of a heavy body through the sky is the direct cause of the luminous phenomenon known as a fire-ball.
The fall of stones at Siena, in Tuscany.
Pane 4c.
8. About seven o'clock on the evening of June 16, 1794, as if to direct attention to Chladni's just published theory, there fell a shower of stones at Siena, in Tuscany.