Some have fared better, as did the 1,375-pound La Caille, France, meteorite, which the people of the village used for two centuries as a seat in front of their church. Others, however, have fared even worse. Blacksmiths and assayers have smelted up and destroyed a number of iron meteorites either in the making of tools (like plowshares, axe-heads, and knife-blades) or in the quest for precious metals. Nearly all of the iron meteorite that was found by the farmer near Pittsburgh was worked up by a blacksmith and lost to science. Even the stone meteorites have occasionally fallen victims to man’s greed for gold. Miners who believed that the 80-pound San Emigdio, California, stony meteorite was gold-bearing mashed it to powder in an ore-crusher. On the contrary, people who, in one way or another, have become acquainted with the characteristics of meteorites have brought a number of these objects to the attention of scientists. For example, one of the University of Nebraska men who worked on the excavation and removal of the large Furnas County stone meteorite (see Chapter 2) became keenly interested at that time in meteorites in general, and took the trouble to learn as much as he could about them. Several years later, after he had become director of a state park museum in southern Oklahoma, a large metallic mass was reported to him. The finder of this mass of metal had known of its existence for some 20 years, but had never succeeded in getting anyone to examine it carefully. The former field worker took one look at the object and, on the basis of his knowledge of meteorites, concluded that it probably was a huge iron meteorite. He immediately called the Institute of Meteoritics by long distance and was able to give such a wealth of significant details that a field party left at once for the site. In this way, the Lake Murray, Oklahoma, meteorite was identified and recovered. [Illustration: The Lake Murray core mounted on the meteorite saw which cut it in half. One of the worn soft iron saw-blades is held above the meteorite by the saw guides. See pp. 167, 168.] The unoxidized central core of this iron weighed more than 600 pounds. Before excavation this core was surrounded by a “shell” of oxidized meteoritic material several inches thick, as shown on page 77. Such a shell of oxide clearly indicated that the meteorite had been subjected to weathering in the ground for many thousands of years.