Jefferson's Humean skepticism about meteorites was not directed just at New England and it was not expressed out of scientific ignorance. He had published several geologic contributions, and he was aware of some details of the then-current scientific controversy over stones falling from the sky. For many skeptics the first convincing investigation had come a few years earlier, in 1803, when Jean-Baptiste Biot, a brilliant young professor of the College de France and friend of Laplace, was dispatched by the French Academy of Sciences to investigate a fall of stones near the town of L'Aigle in Normandy. The evidence of nature, derived from experience, must be put into one scale, and in the other the testimony of man, his ignorance, the deception of his senses, his lying disposition. Nevertheless, evidence has gradually accumulated in support of stones falling from the sky, with more than a thousand such events documented and over 10,000 meteorites catalogued in collections.
Irons are of course the epitome of meteorites and obviously come from somewhere else.
But they are the exception, only a few percent of all meteorites. But stony meteorites are in fact utterly unearthly. They are Rosetta stones recording the primeval history of the Solar System and before. Evidence has gradually accumulated that these meteorites are the original condensations of the solar nebula from which our sun and planets formed. They are all primeval, consistently showing evidence that nearly nothing has happened to them in the last 4.5 billion years.