Something Left Behind

After a violent thunderstorm on 17 August 1887, a round lump of iron about two inches across turned up in a Brixton garden. The chemist who tested it could not match it to meteorites.

J. Huband Smith described to the Royal Irish Academy a set of Chinese seals found in Ireland, all alike, each a cube with a seated animal on top.

In 1838 A. B. Tomlinson dug into the big mound he owned at Grave Creek, West Virginia, and said he found a small oval stone inscribed with alphabetic characters.

In March 1876 flakes of what looked like beef fell from a clear sky near Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, over a strip of ground about 100 yards long.

A stone of plainly artificial shape was said to have fallen at Naples in November 1885. Two professors treated it as unexplained; Nature's correspondent took it for a shoemaker's lapstone of Vesuvian lava.

A small disk of shaped stone fell at Tarbes, France, on 20 June 1887. The French Academy's examiners found it was gypsum and had without doubt been worked.