Many years before this, however, the German philosopher Chladni had collected all the evidence for such events then avail able, and had laid particular stress, curiously enough, upon the occurrence in various parts of the world of masses of iron which had not actually been seen to fall but had been found in places where their presence could not be accounted for except on the supposition of an extra-terrestrial origin. One of these masses weighing over 1,500 lb. was found on the top of a mountain m. south of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and was seen by the traveller Pallas in 1772; while other masses, of which one weighing 1,400 lb. is now in the Natural History Museum, had been found in the desert of the Gran Chaco, Argentina. Since Chladni's time, many other masses of iron meteorites, some of enormous size, have been recorded from different localities. One of the largest is the 361 ton mass brought from Cape York, Greenland to New York by the Arctic Explorer R. E. Peary and now in the American Museum of Natural History. It is the largest meteorite preserved in a Museum, though in size it may perhaps be rivalled by the mass about 13 ft. long which is still lying where it fell on the farm El Ranchito near Bacubirito in Mexico, and also by a mass found in 1921 near Cinquetti in the desert of Adrar, Mauretania, al though the original statement that it measured ioo metres in length still lacks confirmation. All these masses, however, would fall into insignificance beside the mass the impact of which it has been maintained by some must have given rise to that curious crater-like depression near Canon Diablo in Arizona known as Coon Butte which is 4,000 ft. across and some 55o ft. deep, with walls of limestone and sandstone rising over ioo ft. above the plain. Several tons of meteoric iron have been found in the neigh bourhood of the "crater," but borings have failed hitherto to locate any large mass within it. The largest mass of meteoric iron in the British Natural History Museum is the 31 ton mass which was found in 1854 at Cranbourne near Melbourne, Australia.
Although specimens of iron meteorites bulk largely in museum collections and have resulted from as many as about 25o distinct falls, of only about 20 has the fall been actually witnessed. On the other hand, the great majority of stony meteorites (some 600) have been seen to fall, for if not recovered soon after they reach the ground they are more liable to suffer disintegration and escape notice than large masses of iron. Of these no specimens compare in size with the iron meteorites. The largest mass known was a 1,200 lb. stone found in fragments at Long Island, Kansas. The largest unbroken stone preserved in a museum (the Natural His tory Museum, Vienna) is one weighing 645 lb. which fell at Knyahinya in Czechoslovakia and is said to have made a hole in the ground II ft. deep. This was the largest stone of a shower of about I,000 which fell near that place on June 9, 1866. The number of stones which fall at any one time and place is usually small and occasionally, as in 12 of the 15 falls recorded in the British Isles, only a single stone is recovered. In some falls, how ever, as in that of Knyahinya and that of L'Aigle already referred to there are showers of hundreds and thousands of stones. Be
sides these two showers, the most remarkable are the fall of some stones near Pultusk, Poland, on Jan. 30, 1868, of 3,000 at Mocs, Transylvania, on Feb. 3, 1882, of Soo at Hessle, Sweden, on Jan. 1, 1869, 10o near Homestead, Iowa, on Feb. 12, 1875, and 14.00o near Holbrook, Arizona, on July 19, 1912. The stones of such showers are distributed over elliptic areas up to 16 m. in length and the largest stones of greatest momentum travel the farthest before reaching the ground. In the Holbrook shower thousands of the individuals were very small, some not much larger than grape seeds, but each one was covered with the characteristic thin black fused crust.
There are few if any really authentic records of death or injury to man being inflicted by meteoric stones, but several—as at Benares, Kilbourn, Pillistfer, etc.—have struck buildings or fallen through roofs. Of these occurrences the most startling, perhaps, was the fall of a mass of iron at Braunau, Bohemia on July 1847, which penetrated the roof of a house and covered with debris the bed in which three children were sleeping; one of the most recent is the crashing through the roof of a house of one of the four stones which fell on Dec. 3, 1917, in the Strathmore district, Scotland.