7 34 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In trying to interest you in this subject, so remote from the studies 

 of most of you, I rely upon your sense of the unity of all science, and 

 at the same time upon the strong hold which these weird bodies have 

 ever had upon the imaginations of men. In ancient times temples 

 were built over the meteorite images that fell down from Jupiter, and 

 divine worship was paid them, and in these later days a meteorite 

 stone that fell last year in India became the object of daily anoint- 

 ings and other ceremonial worship. In the fearful imagery of the 

 Apocalypse the terrors are deepened by there falling " from heaven a 

 great star burning as a torch," and by the stars of heaven falling 

 " unto the earth as a fig-tree casteth her unripe figs when she is shaken 

 of a great wind." The " great red dragon, having seven heads and 

 ten horns, and upon his heads seven diadems " is presented in the form 

 of a huge fire-ball. " His tail draweth the third part of the stars of 

 heaven, and did cast them to the earth." Records of these feared 

 visitors, under the name of flying dragons, are found all through the 

 pages of the monkish chroniclers of the middle ages. The Chinese 

 appointed officers to record the passage of meteors and comets, for 

 they were thought to have somewhat to say to the weal or woe of 

 rulers and people. 



By gaining in these later days a sure place in science, these bodies 

 have lost their terrors, but so much of our knowledge about them is 

 fragmentary, and there is still so much that is mysterious, that men 

 have loved to speculate about their origin, their functions, and their 

 relations to other bodies in the solar system. It has been easy, and 

 quite common, too, to make these bodies the cause of all kinds of 

 things for which other causes could not be found. 



They came from the moon ; they came from the earth's volcanoes ; 

 they came from the sun ; they came from Jupiter and the other plan- 

 ets ; they came from the comets ; they came from the nebulous 

 mass from which the solar system has grown ; they came from the 

 fixed stars ; they came from the depth of space. They supply the 

 sun with his radiant energy ; they give the moon her accelerated mo- 

 tion ; they break in pieces heavenly bodies ; they threw up the mount- 

 ains on the moon ; they made large gifts to our geologic strata ; they 

 cause the auroras ; they give regular and irregular changes to our 

 weather. A comparative geology has been built up from the relations 

 of the earth's rocks to the meteorites ; a large list of new animal 

 forms has been named from their concretions ; and the possible intro- 

 duction of life to our planet has been credited to them. They are 

 satellites of the earth ; they travel in streams, and in groups, and in 

 isolated orbits about the sun ; they travel in groups and singly through 

 stellar spaces ; it is they that reflect the zodiacal light ; they consti- 

 tute the tails of comets ; the solar corona is due to them ; the long 

 coronal rays are meteor-streams seen edgewise. 



Nearly all of these ideas have been urged by men deservedly of 



