greater part of this collection went later to the Ambrosian Library at Milan, but Chladni sought in vain there for any trace of the death-dealing meteorite.[190] Among the Welsh peasants there is a belief that when a meteor falls to the earth it becomes reduced to a mass of jelly. This they name _pwdre ser_. The most plausible explanation offered for this fancy is that the autumn, the season when the largest number of meteors may be observed, is also the time of the year when the jelly-like masses of the plasmodium of Myxomycetes most frequently appear in the fields. A peasant who, after noting the apparent fall of a meteor, should go in search of it, might easily come across one of these lumps of plasma, and might well be induced to think that he had found all that was left of the meteor after its violent fall to the earth. Of course we have here to do with the apparent, not with the real, fall of a meteorite. In this connection it is interesting to note that the _medusa_, or jelly-fish, has been called a “fallen star” by sailors.[191] This Welsh fancy that meteors or “falling-stars” turned to a jelly when they struck the earth appears to have been quite general in Great Britain, and the jelly-like substance was variously named “star-slough,” “star-shoot,” “star-gelly” or “jelly,” “star-fall’n.” The Welsh _pwdre ser_ literally means “star-rot.” As early as 1641 Sir John Suckling (1609–1642) wrote the following lines which well describe the way in which these gelatinous substances came to be regarded as the remains of a “fallen star”: As he whose quicker eye doth trace A false star shot to a mark’d place Do’s run apace, And, thinking it to catch, A jelly up do snatch. Sir Walter Scott also, whose familiarity with superstitions was very great, has not failed to note this one in his “Talisman,” where the hermit says: “Seek a fallen star and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which in shooting through the horizon has assumed an appearance of splendour.” Here the star itself is supposed to have had this gelatinous form. An early writer,[192] noting this curious belief that “a white and gelatinous substance” was all that remained of a fallen star, declares that he had clearly demonstrated to the Royal Society that the mass was composed of the intestines of frogs, and had been vomited by crows, adding that his opinion had been confirmed by the testimony of other scientific men. Huxley, from a description, conjectured that the substance was nostoc, a gelatinous vegetable mass, but this seems to be somewhat doubtful. In 1744 Robert Boyle states that some of this “star-shoot” was given to a physician of his acquaintance, who “digested it in a well-stopt glass for a long time,” and then sold the liquor for a specific in the removal of wens.[193]