The vicar of St. Michel declared, that he observed one of the stones fall with a hissing noise at the feet of his niece, in the court-yal d of his parsonage, and that it rebounded more than a foot from the pavement. He instantly requested his niece to fetch it; but, as she was too much alarmed, a woman, who happened also to be on the spot, took it up, and it was found in every respect to resemble the others.
As one Piche, a wire-manufacturer in the village of Awes, was working with his men in the open air, a stone grazed his arm, and fell at his feet ; but it was so hot, that, on attempting to take it up, he instantly let it fall again.
He who compares the various accounts of the L'Ai gle meteor with a critical eye, may, no doubt, detect some apparent contradictions, but which, on reflection, will be found strictly conformable to truth. Thus, ac cording to some, the meteor had a rapid motion, others believed it to be stationary : some saw a very luminous ball of fire, and others only an ordinary cloud. Spec tators, in fact, viewed it in different positions with re gard to its direction; for they who happened to be in the line of its progress would see it stationary, for the same reason that we fancy a ship under full sail to be motionless when we are placed in its wake, or when we view it from a harbour to which it is approaching in a straight line; they, on the other hand, who had a side view of it, would reckon its motion the more rapid as their position approached to a right angle with the line of its passage, while they who saw it from behind, as the inhabitants of L'Aigle, would perceive only the cloud of vapour which it left in its train, and which, in the shade, would figure like a blazing tail, in the same manner as the smoke of a volcano appears black (lur ing the (lay and red at night ; lastly, they who were placed in front of the meteor would reckon it staticnary, but hrilliant and cloudless.
It deserves to be remarked, that most of the stones, for some days after their descent, were very friable ; that they gradually acquired hardness; and that, after they had lost the sulphureous odour on their surface, they still retained it in their substance, as was disco vered by breaking them. Professor Sage submitted them to several comparative trials with those of Ville franche ; and, although the L'Aigle specimens present ed some globules of the size of a small coriander seed, of a darker grey than the mass, and not attractable by the magnet, yet, in respect of granular texture and ge neral aspect, the coincidence was so striking as to lead one to suppose that they were all parts of the same mass. According to Fourcroy, who was also furnish
ed with documents and specimens, most of the L'Aigle stones were irregular, polygonal, often cuboid, some times sub-cuneiform, and exceedingly various in their diameter and weight. They were all, he observes, co vered with a black gravelly crust, consisting of a fused matter, and filled with small agglutinated grains of iron. The greater part of them were broken at the corners, ei ther by their shock against one another, or by falling on hard bodies. The interior parts resembled those of all the meteorites analysed by Messrs. Howard and Vauquelin, being grey, somewhat varied in their shad ings, granulated, and as it were scaly, split in many parts, and filled with brilliant metallic points, exactly of the same aspect as those of other stones of the like kind. Of the two specimens which M. Biot presented to Patrin, one was less compact, and of a lighter grey than the other, and exhibited, besides, small patches of a rust colour. When immersed in water, it gave a hiss ing sound like the humming of a fly when held by one wing. As it began to dry, it was observed to be mark ed by curvilinear and parallel layers. The more com pact specimen, when moistened, presented no such ap pearances, but assumed the aspect of a grey porphyry, with a base of trap, mottled with small white spots, and speckled with metallic points.
Vauquelin's analysis of these stones yielded Silica . 53 Lime .
Magnesia . 9 Oxyd of iron 36 Nickel 3 Sulphur 2 104 The addition of four per cent. may be attributed to the oxidation of the metals produced by the analysis. The nard reports, Silica . 46 Magnesia 10 Oxyd of iron 45 Nickel 2 Sulphur 5 108 M. Laugier moreover detected a small proportion of chrome. M. Lambotin and others collected specimens of this extraordinary shower of stones, and distributed them among the curious. We have seen two fine sam ples, one of them nearly entire, in Mr. Ferguson's col lection, which we have already repeatedly quoted.