Bronze ax.
My own notion is that an expedition to the North Pole could not be so urgent as that representative scientists should have gone to that farmer and there spent a summer studying this one reported occurrence. As it is—un-named farmer—somewhere—no date. The thing must stay damned.
Another specimen for our museum is a comment in Nature upon these objects: that they are "of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of terrestrial, and not a celestial, character." Just why celestiality, or that of it which, too, is only of Intermediateness should not be quite as amusing as terrestriality is beyond our reasoning powers, which we have agreed are not ordinary. Of course there is nothing amusing about wedges and spheres at all—or Archimedes and Euclid are humorists. It is that they were described derisively. If you'd like a little specimen of the standardization of orthodox opinion—
Amer. Met. Jour., 4-589:
"They are of an amusing character, thus clearly showing that they were of a terrestrial and not a celestial character."
I'm sure—not positively, of course—that we've tried to be as easygoing and lenient with Mr. Symons as his obviously scientific performance would permit. Of course it may be that sub-consciously we were prejudiced against him, instinctively classing him with St. Augustine, Darwin, St. Jerome, and Lyell. As to the "thunderstones," I think that he investigated them mostly "for the credit of Englishmen," or in the spirit of the Royal Krakatoa Committee, or about as the commission from the French Academy investigated meteorites. According to a writer in Knowledge, 5-418, the Krakatoa Committee attempted not in the least to prove what had caused the atmospheric effects of 1883, but to prove—that Krakatoa did it.
Altogether I should think that the following quotation should be enlightening to anyone who still thinks that these occurrences were investigated not to support an opinion formed in advance:
In opening his paper, Mr. Symons says that he undertook his investigation as to the existence of "thunderstones," or "thunderbolts" as he calls them—"feeling certain that there was a weak point somewhere, inasmuch as 'thunderbolts' have no existence."
We have another instance of the reported fall of a "cannon ball." It occurred prior to Mr. Symons' investigations, but is not mentioned by him. It was investigated, however. In the Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., 3-147, is the report of a "thunderstone," "supposed to have fallen in Hampshire, Sept., 1852." It was an iron cannon ball, or it was a "large nodule of iron pyrites or bisulphuret of iron." No one had seen it fall. It had been noticed, upon a garden path, for the first time, after a thunderstorm. It was only a "supposed" thing, because—"It had not the character of any known meteorite."
In the London Times, Sept. 16, 1852, appears a letter from Mr. George E. Bailey, a chemist of Andover, Hants. He says that, in a very heavy thunderstorm, of the first week of September, 1852, this iron object, had fallen in the garden of Mr. Robert Dowling, of Andover; that it had fallen upon a path "within six yards of the house." It had been picked up "immediately" after the storm by Mrs. Dowling. It was about the size of a cricket ball: weight four pounds. No one had seen it fall. In the Times, Sept. 15, 1852, there is an account of this thunderstorm, which was of unusual violence.