"In Science, n.s., 31-298, E.D.Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, asserts, or confesses that often have objects of material such as fossiliferous limestone and slag been sent to him. He says that these things have been accompanied by assurances that they have been seen to fall on lawns, on roads, in front of houses." (Pages 127-128)
"With many of our data of coal that has fallen from the sky as accessible then as they are now, and with the scientific pronouncement that coal is fossil, how, in a real existence, or a state in which there is real intelligence, or a form of thinking that does not indistinguishably merge away with imbecility, could there have been such a row as that which was raised about forty years ago over Dr.Hahn's announcement that he had found fossils in meteorites? ...That the substance that fell at Kaba, Hungary, April 5, 1857, contained organic matter 'analogous to fossil waxes.' " A block of limestone was said to have fallen at Middleburg, Florida. "It is said that, though something had been seen to fall in 'an old cultivated field,' the witnesses who ran to it picked up something that 'had been upon the ground in the first place.' The writer who tells us this, with the usual exclusion-imagination known as stupidity...thinks he can think of a good-sized stone that had for many years been in a cultivated field, but that had never been seen before---- had never interfered with plowing, for instance. He is earnest and unjarred when he writes that this stone weighs 200 pounds. ...Dr.Hahn said that he had found fossils in meteorites. There is a description of corals, sponges, and crinoids, all of them microscopic, which he photographed, in Popular Science, 20-83. Dr.Hahn was a well-known scientist. He was better known after that. ...In the reproductions every feature of some of the little shells is plainly marked. If they're not shells, neither are things under an oyster-counter. The striations are very plain: one sees even the hinges where bivalves are joined. Prof.Lawrence Smith (Knowledge, 1-258): 'Dr.Hahn is a kind of half-insane man, whose imagination has run away with him.' ...Then Dr.Weinland examined Dr.Hahn's specimens. He gave his opinion that they are fossils and that they are not crystals of enstatite, as asserted by Prof.Smith, who had never seen them. ...After the publication of Dr.Weinland's findings ---silence" (Pages 79-80) In Popular Science, 20-83, Francis Bingham, writing of the corals and sponges and shells and crinoids that Dr.Hahn had asserted that he had found in meteorites, says, judging by the photographs of them, that their 'notable peculiarity' is their 'extreme smallness.' The corals, for instance, are about one-twentieth the size of terrestrial corals. 'They represent a veritable pygmy animal world,' says Bingham." (Pages 169-170)
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