SOLAR SYSTEM/Meteorites 229 several chariots and killed ten men, a unique fatality The sacred stone built into the Kaaba at Mecca is reported to have been long known prior to Islam and to have fallen from the sky Such falls were given a religious significance, and officers of the Geological Survey in India had to go hot-foot to the site of a fall or the mass was either enshrined or broken into pieces to release evil spirits American Indians confused later scientists by transporting masses long distances and burying them in cysts Particularly pleasing is the custom in mediaeval France of chaining meteorites up to prevent them departing as swiftly as they arrived or from wandering at night The earliest material from a fall preserved in western Europe is believed to be at Ensisheim, Alsace, stored in the local church since it fell in ad 1462 Despite all these early records (and there are many more, in particular from Russia and China), scientists were slow to accept the process of rocky or metal material falling from the sky Though there are records of the finds of irons and the falls of stones much earlier and the problem had been solved – Diogenes of Apollonia wrote ‘‘meteors are invisible stars that fall to Earth and die out, like the fiery, stony star that fall to Earth near the Egos Potamos River (in 465 bc): and natives in northern Argentina had led the conquistadors to buried masses of exotic iron, of supposed celestial origin in 1576 – scientific acceptance was widely achieved only in the last years of the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment and the earliest years of the nineteenth century, with natives leading the explorer Pallas in Siberia to a buried stony-iron mass reputedly fallen from the sky; also falls were followed by material recovery at Wold Cottage, near Scarborough, Yorkshire and L/Aigle France The fall at Albareto, Italy, in 1766, had been well described by the Abbe´ Dominico Troili, but dismissed as the product of a subterranean explosion which hurled it high in the sky from a vent in the Earth The stone which fell at Luce´ , France in 1768, the first to be chemically analysed, was dismissed as neither from thunder, nor fallen from the sky, but as a piece of pyritiferous sandstone by a panel of august scientists! So it was the Pallas stony-iron meteorite (700 kg, ‘Krasnojarsk’), the subject, together with the Otumpa iron from South America, of a book published by E.F.F Chladni in Riga in 1794, which really established the scientific reality of meteorite falls Both were exotic, being found far from any known volcanic province, and by a process of elimination, he reached a single possible answer and further connected them with the phenomenon of fireball meteors Russian scientific circles were distant from western Europe, and the English were really convinced only by the fall of a stone at Wold Cottage near Scarborough in 1795 This came into the possession of Joseph Banks, who recognized the similarity of the black fusion crust to the Siena fall material of 1794 in his possession Edward Howard studied both and the presentation of his findings to the Royal Society in 1802–1803 convinced sceptics in England Presentation to the Institut de France convinced several important scientists, but resistance to the idea was not finally overcome in that country until 3000 stones showered down on L’Aigle, Normandy and were described by Biot Chladni’s work then received belated international acknowledgement, but decades would elapse before the connection with fireballs was completely established and a century before the origin of most of them through impacts between asteroids would be established Classification The classification of meteorites has developed over the years and some new types and revisions of the system have inevitably arisen in the last half of the twentieth century with the prolific collection from optimum Antarctic and desert regions; despite this, the system remains workable though some revision might in time be necessary There are three principal classes: Irons (Figures 3, 4) Stony-irons (Figure 5) Stones (Figure 2) The latter are subdivided into (i) Chondrites, which display rounded bodies (chondrules) (Figures 6, 7), Figure The Haig, Western Australia, iron (find 1951, 480 kg, III AB) with typical hackly markings on the surface