THE ORIGIN AND STRUCTURE OF METEORITES. 375 



Some of the more remarkable falls were objects of extraordinary atten- 

 tion among the inquisitive but imperfectly informed ancients, and the 

 stones themselves were invested with something like divine honors. 

 But, notwithstanding the frequent and authentic testimonials that were 

 given of the fall of meteoric bodies upon the earth in the course of 

 more than twenty centuries, educated people were still incredulous on 

 the subject not more than a hundred years ago. Inversely to the usual 

 course, even the advance of knowledge furnished objections against 

 the truth. The most natural supposition of an extra-terrestrial origin 

 of the meteors appeared to contradict the immutable laws of the move- 

 ments of the heavenly bodies ; for those laws seemed to be inconsist- 

 ent with the possibility of irregular phenomena. It was easier to deny 

 the reality of such anomalies than to believe in them. But it will not 

 be right to give too severe a condemnation to this persistent denial ; 

 for the fabulous and fanciful details with which the accounts of the 

 phenomena were charged necessarily gave an air of incredibility to 

 the whole. It was not till the end of the last century that conditions 

 especially favorable to exact observations afforded the means of unan- 

 swerably demonstrating the existence of meteors. The recognition of 

 them became general and complete after the showers that occurred at 

 Benares, India, at eight o'clock in the evening of the 13th of Decem- 

 ber, 1798, in the presence of a large number of spectators ; and was 

 further strengthened after the fall at L'Aigle, France, at one o'clock in 

 the afternoon of the 26th of April, 1803. Biot, acting under a com- 

 mission of the Academy of Sciences, made a minute account of all the 

 circumstances of the last fall. 



Meteorites interest us not only in respect to the origin and the 

 causes of their descent upon our planet, but also in respect to their 

 constitution. It is to the last aspect that we shall pay particular at- 

 tention, after giving a succinct account of the circumstances under 

 which they come to us. 



The phenomena that precede and accompany falls of meteorites, 

 while they vary very much in their secondary details, nevertheless pre- 

 sent a whole of general character, reoccurring with constancy at each 

 apparition, and adequately proving that the origin of the bodies is 

 foreign to our planet. 



The first appearance is that of a globe of fire bright enough to set 

 all the atmosphere aglow at night, or to be visible at high noon, if in 

 the daytime. Its apparent diameter increases as it gets nearer. It 

 describes a track whose incandescence makes it perceptible from a dis- 

 tance, and which is only slightly inclined to the horizon. The cosmic 

 character of the bodies is indicated by their excessive velocity, which 

 surpasses anything that we know of on the earth, and is in reality com- 

 parable to that of the planetary bodies. After a longer or shorter 

 career, the body bursts with a noise which has been compared with 

 that of thunder, a cannon, or musketry, according to the distance away 



