Omniana/Volume 2/Meteorolithes

by Robert Southey

223. Meteorolithes.

The sky-stone in New Mexico is mentioned by Humboldt, whose book has reached me since the account of it given by Gaspar de Villagra was printed in a former volume (No. 98). "In the environs of Durango, he says, is to be found insulated in the plain the enormous mass of malleable iron and nickel, which is of the identical composition of the aerolithos which fell in 1751; at Ilraschina, near Agram, in Hungary. Specimens were communicated to me by the learned director of the Tribunal de Mineria de Mexico, Don Fausto d'Elhuyar, which I deposited in different cabinets of Europe, and of which M. M. Vauquelin and Klaproth published an analysis. This mass of Durango is affirmed to weigh upwards of 1900 miriagrammes, which is 400 more than the aerolithos discovered at Olumpa in the Tucuman, by M. Rubin de Celis. A distinguished mineralogist, M. Frederick Sonnenschmidt, who travelled over much more of Mexico than myself, discovered also in 1792, in the interior of the town of Zacatecas, a mass of malleable iron of the weight of 977 myriagrammes, which in its exterior and physical character was found by him entirely analogous with the malleable iron described by the celebrated Pallas."

Political Essay. Black's translation,
Vol. 2, p. 292.

Humboldt's account reduces the size of the Mexican sky-stone something more than half; still it remains greatly larger than any other which has been yet discovered.

The mass of pure iron found in the nterior of the Cape Colony, which Mr. Barrow^[1] supposes to have been the thick part of a ship's anchor, carried there from the coast by the Kaffers, is far more probably a sky—stone. It is remarkable that Mr. Barrow should be so well satisfied with his solution of the difficulty as to apply it in another instance, where the aerial origin of the mass appears certain. "We were told (he says,) that in the neighbourhood of the Knysua, another large mass of native iron had been discovered, similar to that which I mentioned to have seen in the plains of the Zuure Veldt, and which I then supposed the Kaffers to have carried thither from the sea shore. I paid little attention to the report at that time; but since my return to the Cape, the discovery of a third mass, in an extraordinary situation, the very summit of Table Mountain, excited a stronger degree of curiosity. I imagined the first to have been the flat part of an anchor, although it was destitute of any particular shape; but in this of Table Mountain, which may weigh from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty pounds, there appeared some faint traces of the shape of the flook, or the broad part of the arm which takes hold of the ground. It was found half buried in sand and quartz pebbles, every part, as well under as above ground, much corroded, and the cavities filled with pebbles, which however did not appear to be component parts of the mass, not being angular, but evidently rounded by attrition. As, in the first instance, I suppose the Kaffers to have carried the mass into the situation it was discovered in; so also with regard to the latter, I am inclined to think it must have been brought upon the summit of the mountain by the native Hottentots, as to a place of safety, when Bartholomew Diaz, or some of the early Portugueze navigators, landed first in this country. Others, however, who have seen and examined the mass, are of opinion, that it must have been placed in its present situation at a period long antecedent to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by Europeans. Be that as it may, the Neptunean appearances of various parts of Southern Africa, which are particularly striking in the formation of the Table Mountain, press strongly on the recollection the beautiful observation of the Latin poet:

Vidi ego, quod fuerat quondam solidissima tellus
Esse fretum. Vidi factas ex æquore terras,
Et procul a pelago conchæ jacuere marinæ,
Et vetus inventa est in montibus auchora summis."

Vol. 2, P. 79

Paracelsus, in his treatise De Meteoris, has a curious section, De Lapide e Cœlo, in which, mingled with some strange and daring errors, he hits upon the true solution of the phænomenon. Lapidum istorum generationes hoc se modo habent. Compertum vobis est quo pacto fulmen nascatur, quod lapis est, et manifeste quidem. Jam si tonitrus principia adsint, et colligantur in fulmem, et possibile et naturale est, ut per generationem ejusmodi fulmina decem, viginti, plura, pauciorave producantur. Quot enim fragores tot lapides. Hujusmodi autem generationum multæ si in generationem unam coëant, ex omnibus lapis fit unicus, qui fulgur est. Hinc sequitur magnitudo aut multitudo lapidis, ac ipsius forma naturaque prout cognoscitur. Si ergo talis generatio est, in tempestatem graviorem desinere non potest. Generatio enim ea nimis celeriter fit, et excidit ex aere quamprimum coagulata fuerit. Et sicut aqua initiò per se mollis est, congelata autem fit dura: sic ista quoque materia initiò est res aëria, postea, ut aqua incipit coagulari, Indurata autem non amplius est aërea, sed fit terrea. Ipsam ergo aer amplius retinere non potest, sed elabi sinit.

Ex hoc liquet, fieri posse ut hujusmodi materiæ conveniant, sine omni tempestate, et sese citra omnem cursum in cœlo cungregent, ejusque omnino sint naturæ, ut conveniant, et se invicem indurent. Sic plumbum liquefactum, quam primum aquæ infunditur, momento induruit. Hujusmodi materiæ sunt etiam in firmamento ignis. Quæ donec contrarium non habent, aereæ manent. Ubi autem extraneum contrarium incidit, aliæ fiunt, et aereæ esse desinunt. Ita et de pluviâ notum est, donec nubes est, terram non attingit, sed libratur in sublimitate. Quamprimum autem conjunctionem peregrinam assumit et dissolvitur, fit corporea et terrestris. Inde ergo aqua fit, et pluvia, in sublimitate amplius contineri non valens, sed decidens. Tales in cœlo sunt etiam materiæ ex quibus lapides fiunt ob naturam tonitrualem, hoc est, fulmineam. Sic et alia plura si à contrariis impetantur, lapides fiunt.

T. 2, P. 319.

The popular and almost universal belief in thunderbolts cannot be without some foundation. Great quantities of a kind of transparent ore, pointed at one end, are found in Angola, which the inhabitants call tarc, and believe to be engendered in the air, and that it falls from thence in thundering weather^[2]. The peasants in Norway say, that the thunder darts down the stones which they call thunderbolts, aiming them at the Troll, a kind of witches, or infernal spirits of the night, who otherwise would destroy the whole world^[3].

One of the most remarkable passages which I have met with upon this subject is in Lassels's^[4] Italian Voyage. He says that in the cabinet of the Canonigo Setalis at Milan, there was a piece of a thunderbolt, which the Canon said he himsel cut out of the thigh of a man that had been stricken with it. The fact may not be true, but I would not pronounce it impossible.

Is it probable that the showers of dust which are so frequently mentioned, and always attributed to the eruption of some volcano, are sometimes produced in the same manner as the sky-stones? The black dust which fell in Zetland and Orkney in 1755 was supposed to have come from Hecla; but it came with a south-west wind, and, as was remarked at the time, supposing that a north wind happening just before had carried this dust to the southward, and the southwest wind immediately following had brought it back to the northward, in that case would not the black dust have been observed in Zetland when on its way to the south^[5]? One of the missionaries from the Society for propagating the Gospel relates a fact which seems strongly to support what I have conjectured. "Pursuing our voyage among the Canary islands, it was observed one morning that the ship's rigging had gathered a red sand, which it posed the sailors to account for, not being within view of any land. None of them had ever seen the like before, and it could only be conjectured that the wind must have brought it off from the Pike of Teneriffe^[6]."

Spallanzani^[7], examining some stones which fell in an ignited shower from Vesuvius, found that they were particles of lava, which had become solid in the air, and taken a globose form.

According to some of the Mahommedan doctors, the storm which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah was a hailstorm of red-hot stones, heated in the furnaces of Hell.

 

1. Travels in South Africa, Vol. I, p. 226.
2. Mod. Univ. Hist. Vol. 6, fol. edit. p. 491.
3. Pontoppidan.
4. Part. 1, p. 56.
5. Edmonston's View of the Zetland Islands, vol. 2. p. 185.
6. Two Missionary Voyages to New Jersey, and to the Coast of Guiney, by Thomas Thompson, Vicar of Reculver in Kent, 1758.
7. Travels in the Two Sicilies. Ch. 1.