Volume 1

William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter.

  • Isaac Todhunter
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the earth’s atmosphere; might there, owing to some natural event or other, combine; of course with explosive violence, noise and fire, and might then fall to the earth. I do not know if his theory made many converts; some of us certainly laughed at it, and one of my friends said that it seemed to him just as likely that the air should drop biscuits from time to time in the neigh- bourhood of a flour mill. But the accounts of the peculiaiities of the known masses of meteoric iron were very curious, lheie was a specimen of Pallas’s Siberian specimen in the Geological Mu- seum which had been bequeathed to the University of Cambiidge by Woodward; a man ridiculed by Pope who was his contempo- rary, but who was far in advance of his age in perceiving the importance of collections of organic and other fossils. Among other curiosities he had managed to procure a specimen of this Siberian mass of meteoric iron. And there were indeed two spe- cimens of this mass in the collection ; for one of the W oodwardian Professors, Hailstone, had procured a specimen after the mass became known through Pallas’s account of it; and had placed it in the Woodwardian Museum to shew how vigilant and judicious Woodward had been in making his collection of curiosities. [We now pass to the Third Part of the piece.] We now approached the place where the celebrated mass of meteoric iron had been found and where it was sujiposed to have fallen on its arrival at the earth. This spot is, as we are told by Pallas, an elevated point of a slate-mountain, between the rivulets .Ubei and Sisim, both which spring from the side of the wild mountains between Abakansk and Balskoi, or Karaulnoi Ortrog, and fall into the Yenisei: the spot is four wersts from the former, and six wersts from the latter place; and about twenty wersts from the Yenisei. The mass when found was entirely detached and exposed; and the inspector who had his attention drawn to it by the Cossack who discovered it (in 1749), took care to ascertain by careful examination that there was no trace of mining or smelting operations in the- neighbourhood. o