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Meteorites, or Celestial Stones: Chronicle

Many other accidents caused by meteorites or what were believed to be meteorites are recorded, the credibility of some of the statements not being very convincing; others, however, appear to be quite worthy of credence. Thus the Chronicle of Ibn Alathir relates that several persons were killed by a rain of stones that fell to the earth in Africa in August, 1020 A.D. In the middle of the seventeenth century the tower of a prison building in Warsaw is said to have been destroyed by a meteorite. A hundred years or so before, on May 19, 1552, there was a great fall of stones, not far from Eisleben, one of which killed the favorite steed of Count Schwarzenburg, while another wounded the count's body-physician, Dr. Mitthobius, in the foot. This was witnessed by Spangenberg, who reports it in his Saxon Chronicle; he carried off some of the stones with him to Eisleben. An eight-pound stone (probably a siderite) is stated by a certain Olaf Erikson to have fallen on shipboard and killed two persons, at some time about the middle of the seventeenth century; this is rather indefinite information. The most remarkable happening, however, is reported from Milan from the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century, when a very small meteorite, weighing not quite an ounce, fell into the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace (now a cotton factory) and killed a Franciscan monk. Such was the velocity of this little stone that it penetrated deep into the monk's body, whence it was extracted and preserved for a long time in the Collection of Count Settala. The greater part of this collection went later to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, but Chladni sought in vain there for any trace of the death-dealing meteorite. Among the Welsh peasants there is a belief that when a meteor falls to the earth it becomes reduced to a mass of jelly. This they name pwdre ser. The most plausible explanation offered for this fancy is that the autumn, the season when the largest number of meteors may be observed, is also the time of the year when the jelly-like masses of the plasmodium of Myxomycetes most frequently appear in the fields. A peasant who, after noting the apparent fall of a meteor, should go in search of it, might easily come across one of these lumps of plasma, and might well be induced to think that he had found all that was left of the meteor after its violent fall to the earth. Of course we have here to do with the apparent, not with the real, fall of a meteorite. In this connection it is interesting to note that the medusa, or jelly-fish, has been called a "fallen star" by sailors.