: 6
centimeters by 5 millimeters by about 5 centimeters; said to have fallen
upon a plantation in the Dutch West Indies, after a meteoric explosion.

Bricks.

I think this is a vice we're writing. I recommend it to those who have
hankered for a new sin. At first some of our data were of so frightful
or ridiculous mien as to be hated, or eyebrowed, was only to be seen.
Then some pity crept in? I think that we can now embrace bricks.

The baked-clay-idea was all right in its place, but it rather lacks
distinction, I think. With our minds upon the concrete boats that have
been building terrestrially lately, and thinking of wrecks that may
occur to some of them, and of a new material for the deep-sea fishes to
disregard--

Object that fell at Richland, South Carolina--yellow to gray--said to
look like a piece of brick. (_Amer. Jour. Sci._, 2-34-298.)

Pieces of "furnace-made brick" said to have fallen--in a hailstorm--at
Padua, August, 1834. (_Edin. New Phil. Jour._, 19-87.) The writer
offered an explanation that started another convention: that the
fragments of brick had been knocked from buildings by the hailstones.
But there is here a concomitant that will be disagreeable to anyone who
may have been inclined to smile at the now digestible--enough notion
that furnace-made bricks have fallen from the sky. It is that in some of
the hailstones--two per cent of them--that were found with the pieces of
brick, was a light grayish powder.

_Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society_, 337-365:

Padre Sechi explains that a stone said to have fallen, in a
thunderstorm, at Supino, Italy, September, 1875, had been knocked from a
roof.

_Nature_, 33-153:

That it had been reported that a good-sized stone, of form clearly
artificial, had fallen at Naples, November, 1885. The stone was
described by two professors of Naples, who had accepted it as
inexplicable but veritable. They were visited by Dr. H. Johnstone-Lavis,
the correspondent to _Nature_, whose investigations had convinced him
that the object was a "shoemaker's lapstone."

Now to us of the initiated, or to us of the wider outlook, there is
nothing incredible in the thought of shoemakers in other worlds--but I
suspect that this characterization is tactical.

This object of worked stone, or this shoemaker's lapstone, was made of
Vesuvian lava, Dr. Johnstone-Lavis thinks: most probably of lava of the
flow of 1631, from the La Scala quarries. We condemn "most