ABSTRACT
Early Papers The diversity of papers published in the early volumes of the Philosophical Magazine is reflected both in the Contents of Volume 1 and in the six papers from the last few years of the eighteenth century selected for reproduction in this Part. The papers speak for themselves but mention should be made of the plates or diagrams which are remarkable for their detail and quality, as illustrated by those of the diving machine and the gruesome medical instruments. The trepanning tool was a device used on mentally ill patients to remove a circular section of skull in the belief that evil spirits could thereby be released. The importance of steam engines, evident from the very first article published, was to continue right through the nineteenth century, electricity not of course having yet come of age (see Part Two). The author of the second paper, Ernst F.F.Chladni, was later to obtain same for his demonstrations of standing wave patterns on vibrating surfaces using sandthe so-called Chladni figures. Here he describes a large mass of iron found in Siberia by Professor Pyotr S.Pallas and ascribes it, almost certainly correctly, to a meteorite. Pallas himself was a German who worked at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences for much of his life and contributed greatly to botanical, zoological, geographic and mineralogical investigations in Russia. A minor planet, a volcano (Pallesa) in the Kevil Islands and a reef in New Guinea were named after him; stony meteorites are called pallasite.
