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96 THE MAGIC OF JEWELS AND CHARMS
a
miraculous way, is that during the desperate and bloody battle of
Borodino, won by Napoleon over the Russians, September 6,1812, a
meteorite is said to have fallen near the headquarters of the Russian
general. This would certainly have been regarded—after the event—as a
manifestation of divine wrath, and hence a prognostic of the Russian
defeat. However, had the French been defeated, the meteorite would
have been looked upon as a sign of divine favor, and it would have been
honored and reverenced. In modern times the natural phenomenon is
taken for what it is worth, and the only interest excited is a purely
scientific one. Of all the meteorites that have been discovered, the
most remarkable are undoubtedly those found at Melville Bay, about 35
miles east of Cape York, West Greenland, in 1894, by Admiral, then
Lieutenant, Robert E. Peary, and brought by him to the United States in
1895 and 1897." They are now to be seen in the American Museum of
Natural History, New York. The first report of the existence of
meteoric iron in the vicinity came from Captain Ross, who in 1818 was
given two iron knives, or lance-heads, by some Eskimo of Regent's Bay.
An analysis of the metal revealed the presence of nickel and
immediately suggested a meteoric origin of the material; nothing more
definite could be learned at the time from the Eskimo than that the
metal had been taken from an "iron mountain" not far away. In 1840, the
King of Denmark, whose interest had been aroused in the matter,
authorized the sending out of an expedition to seek for the suspected
siderites, but the search proved unsuccessful ; a later attempt made
by the officers of the North Star, a Franklin relief ship, in
1849-50, also failed. For a time the determination of the telluric
origin of the supposed siderites discovered at Ovifak,Disko Island,West
Greenland,
«Lieut. Robert E. Peary, "Northward over the 'Great Ice,"' New York, 1807, vol. ii, pp. 553 eqq.
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