VII.—A Chapter in the History of Meteorites

Abstract

This remarkable siderolite was found in Bohemia, at a spot not very far distant from the Saxon frontier or indeed from Rittersgrün, in Saxony, where a mass closely resembling it was almost contemporaneously found. So far back as 1751 at Steinbach, a village about midway between Breitenbach and Rittersgrün, a meteorite in all respects similar was discovered; the three masses are so similar to one another and so dissimilar to any others preserved in collections that there can be little doubt that they belong to the same fall. In 1825 Stromeyer examined a siderolite in which he found 61·8 per cent, of silica; this also appears to have been a member of this shower of meteorites, believed by Breithaupt to have been the “Eisenregen” which occurred at Whitsuntide, 1164, in Saxony, when a mass of iron fell near the town of Meissen.