Chronological History of Meteorites, interspersed with _Remarks.
A. C. 1478. The thunder-stone in Crete, mentioned by itlalchus. Par. Chron.-1200. Stones preserved in Orchomenos. Pausan.-1168. A mass of iron, on Mount Ida, in Crete. Par Chron.-705, or 704. The Sacred Shield, or .4ncyle, fell in the reign of No ma, of nearly the same shape with tl.e mass that fell at Agram. But if it really was of brass, and fell into .Vuma's hands, as mentioned by Plutarch, we may well suspect a pious fraud. 654. During the reign of Tul lus Hostilius, a shower of stones fell on Mount Alba, and, when the senate deputed commissioners to ascer tain the fact, they were assured that stones had really fallen, as thick as hail impelled by the wind. Similar events, adds the eloquent Livy, were celebrated by a festival of nine days. At that period, then, the fall of stones was solemnly recognized as a supernatural oc currence : the nature of the masses, however, is not particularly described ; and, on subsequent occasions, the same historian has usually recourse to the general expression, lapidibus pluere, without farther comment or explanation.-644. According to De Guignes, the early historians of China make mention of five stones having fallen from the heavens, in the district of Song. 520. A stone fell in Crete, in the time of Pythagoras. Calmet. —466. Pliny, in the 58th chapter of the second book of his Natural History, commemorates the descent, in the clay-time, of a stony mass, as large as a cart, and of a burnt colour, near Egospotatnos in Thrace, and affirms that it was still exhibited in his time. The magnitudine vehis of this author may probably mean, that it was of such dimensions, that it could he conveyed in a cart ; and some commentators read vchibilis. The Greeks pretended that it had fallen from the sun, and that Anax agoras had predicted the clay of its arrival on the earth's surface. Such a prediction, the naturalist observes, would have been more marvellous than the stone ; and all knowledge, he adds, must be confounded, if either we admit the sun to be a stone, or a stone to fall from that luminary to the earth. Yet, whatever may have been the ingenious or the absurd surmises of those days, the reputed event became a subject of such notoriety, that the author of the Athenian Chronicle, a document pub lished by Sclden, along with the Arundelian marbles, formally places it under the 58th epoch, and in the 113th year of the Attic or Cecropian era. That Anaxagoras foretold the day of the fall, may as well he doubted, as that Sir William Herschel should have lent himself to the occupation of Moore the Almanac•maker : but we learn from a passage in the first book of Silenus, pre served by Ditegenes Lacrtius, that the incident which we are now considering, suggested to the philosopher of Clazomene the hypothesis which he delivered to his dis ciphes, namely, that the sky was a solid vault, compos ed of large stones, which its rotatory motion kept at a due distance from the centre, to which they would, otherwise, inevitably tend. AVe may also remark, that
Pliny broadly asserts the frequent occurrence of the phenomenon—decidere tamcn crebro, baud erit dubium. Sonic curious notices relative to the Thracian stone have likewise been preserved by Plutarch, in his Life of Ly sander. It fell, he remarks, at Egospotamos, was of enormous dimensions, and was exhibited as a public spectacle by the people of the Chersonesus, who held it in great veneration. His account of the meteor is principally borrowed from Damachus or Daimachus, whom Strati° represents as addicted to fiction, and igno rant of geometry.
" During seventy•five successive clays," sans the bio grapher, previous to the fall of the stone, a large fiery body, like a cloud of flame, was obsencd in the hea vens, not fixed to one point, but wandering about with a broken, irregular motion. In consequence of its vio lent agitation, several flaming tragments were forced from it, which were impelled in various directions, and darted with the velocity and splendour of so many fall ing stars. After this body had alighted in the Cherso nesus, and the inhabitants, recovered front their alarm, had assembled to see it, they could perceive no inflam mable matter, nor the slightest trace of fire, but a real stone, which, though large, was nothing when compared to the volume of that fire-ball which they had seen in the sky, but appeared only as a piece detached from it." It is obvious," continues Plutarch, that Damachus must have very indulgent readers, if this account of his gains credit. if it is a true one, it completely refutes those who allege that this stone was merely a rock, torn by a tempest from the top of a mountain, and which, after being conveyed for some time in the air, by means of a whirlwind, settled on the first spot Where the vio lence of the latter abated. This phenomenon, which lasted for so many clays, was, perhaps, after all, a real globe of fire, which, when it dispersed, and became nearly extinct, might induce such a change in the air, and generate such a whirlwind, as might tear the stone from its native bed, and clash it on the plain." Damachus, it is true, may, on this occasion, have given w ay to his love of the marvellous ; and we can readily believe, that the seventy-five continuous days are either an error of the copyist, or an original exag geration. When we reflect, however, that lie is not the sole reporter of the occurrence, and that some of the circumstances which he specifies are very analogous to those which remain to be stated on less questionable au thority, we can hardly refuse to acquiese in the pre sumption, that a meteorite really fell at the period, and on the spot, which are here so particularly specified.