104 THE MAGIC OP JEWELS AND CHARMS
Milan
from the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth
century, when a very small meteorite, weighing not quite an ounce,
fell into the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace (now a cotton factory)
and killed a Franciscan monk. Such was the velocity of this little
stone that it penetrated deep into the monk's body, whence it was
extracted and preserved for a long time in the Collection of Count
Settâla. The 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.69
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.80
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 de-
~ Chladni, op. cit., p. 22.
• See " Nature " for June 23 and July 21, 1910.
