Fortunately, scientific facts have a stubborn way of winning out in the long run. A major part of the credit for seeing that the truth regarding meteorite falls was at last recognized must go to E. F. F. Chladni, a German physicist, and to Edward Howard, an English chemist. In 1794, Chladni published an extremely important paper concerning a large spongelike mass of “native iron” found near Krasnoyarsk, Russia. This object had been discovered in 1749 by a Russian blacksmith, and it was studied in 1772 by P. S. Pallas, an early traveler. Chladni concluded that the mass of iron[11] must have fallen from the heavens, because it had been “fused” (but not by man, electricity, or fire) and also because there were no volcanoes anywhere around its place of find. Chladni supported his theory by listing numerous reports of meteorite falls dating from ancient and medieval times. But Chladni’s fellow scientists flatly rejected his theory as clever but not satisfactory. With the fall of the Siena meteorites in Italy on June 16, 1794, the controversy regarding the possibility that stones actually fell from the sky became particularly heated, and remained so for nearly ten years. During this interval, two other important meteorite falls occurred: Wold Cottage, England, on December 13, 1795, and Benares, India, on December 19, 1798. Scientists had a hard time finding explanations for these well-observed events, and some of the theories put forward to account for them far outdid Chladni’s in “cleverness,” if that be the correct word. One scholar, writing in 1796, suggested that the masses which fell at Siena resulted from the solidification at great height of volcanic ashes from Mount Vesuvius. These ashes had supposedly been carried northward beyond Siena and then been “brought back by a northerly wind, congealing from the air....” Fortunately, in 1803 Edward Howard’s chemical work on meteorites came to a successful conclusion. This patient chemist made analyses of samples from the Siena, Wold Cottage, and Benares falls and from an older Bohemian fall. He also had the samples studied mineralogically by a fellow scientist. From the results of these investigations, he drew the following conclusions, which admirably supported Chladni’s well-reasoned and thoroughly documented theory regarding meteorite falls: All four of the stones studied had very nearly the same composition. Despite the fact that the stones contained no new elements, their mineralogical character differed in several important respects from that of any rocks found naturally on the earth. The four masses must have had a common origin although their reported falls had been widely separated both in time and in space. Finally, said Howard, it was quite possible that the stones had really fallen from the sky.