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lightning. attention." luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it. The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion. Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen: that it had been struck by So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something--that had been upon the ground in the first place. But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them-- Monthly Review, 1796-426 "The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered. The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of the marvelous as almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents. Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold from it a proper degree of The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius-- Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth's surface by whirlwinds or by volcanic action.