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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



jection arising from the circumstance that these 

 bodies must hare been subjected to a very high 

 temperature, we should still have everything to 

 learn as to the way in which the germs arose in 

 the far-distant regions of space from which they 

 have been conveyed. At one of the sectional 

 meetings, a few days later, Sir William Thomson 

 made these observations the text of a further 

 communication on the now well-worn subject. 

 He desired to limit the discussion to the bare, 

 dry question, Was life possible on a meteorite ? 

 The hypothesis which was to explain the bring- 

 ing of life to our earth did not pretend to explain 

 the origin of life, and he would not attempt to 

 offer an explanation of the origin of life. The 

 three questions which presented themselves were 

 these : Was life possible on a meteorite moving 

 in space ? Was life possible on a meteorite 

 while falling to the earth's surface ? and, Could 

 any germs live after the meteorite had become 

 imbedded in the earth ? A meteorite may be 

 exposed to great heat before it reaches the earth ; 

 whether or not life on that meteorite would be 

 destroyed by that heat was dependent on the 

 duration of exposure. If a meteorite traversed 

 space with the same side always exposed to the 

 sun, that side would be strongly heated, the oth- 

 er would be cold ; if it spun round at a uniform 

 rate all its surface would be of one uniform tem- 

 perature ; and if it rotated once per hour it would 

 have a high temperature on one side and be as 

 cold as ice on the other. The whole or part of 

 the surface of a meteorite might afford a climate 

 suitable to some living forms, destructive to oth- 

 ers. When the moss-covered stone enters the 

 atmosphere the germs upon its surface would be 

 torn off long before the stone became heated, 

 and in a few years they may settle down on the 

 earth, take root and grow. But were the germs 

 of the exterior destroyed by heat, there might 

 still be vegetable life in the interior. The time 

 occupied by a stone in its passage through the 

 air would not be more than twenty or thirty sec- 

 onds at the outside, so that the crust might be 

 fused, while the interior might have a moderate 

 temperature, and anything alive in it would fall 

 to the earth alive. Sir William Thomson con- 

 cluded by remarking that after the collision of 

 cosmical masses fragments must be shot off, some 

 of which must certainly carry away living things 

 not destroyed by the shock of the collision, and 

 he did not hesitate to maintain, as a not improb- 

 able supposition, that at some time or other we 

 should have growing on this earth a plant of 

 meteoric origin. At this particular stage of the 



debate (so we are informed by The Western 

 Morning News) some one attending the meet- 

 ing of the section introduced the Colorado bee- 

 tle, and this was held to be irresistibly funny; 

 then some one else got up and said he was an 

 Irishman, which was judged to be even funnier 

 still. At length another speaker arose to breathe 

 the hope that when Papa Colorado Beetle dropped 

 down on a meteorite he would leave Mamma Col- 

 orado Beetle behind, which was felt to be far and 

 away the funniest thing of all. Some of the As- 

 sociates, however — men who had not yet learned 

 to know the length and depth of scientific "wit" 

 — began to feel uneasy ; and although a gallant 

 effort appears at this juncture to have been made 

 to win back their confidence by assuring them 

 that meteorites really do not contain organic 

 matter of any kind, the section was not to be 

 comforted till the telephone was set a-going. 

 But to return. 



Nothing bearing the semblance of a plant or 

 even of its seed has as yet been met with in a 

 meteorite ; nor have any of the masses which 

 have fallen on our planet shown anything ap- 

 proaching the structure which distinguishes sed- 

 imentary rocks from those of a purely plutonic 

 character. The occurrence, however, in them, 

 or with them, of organic compounds, of com- 

 pounds of carbon and hydrogen, which it is hard 

 to suppose could owe their existence to any oth- 

 er agency than that of life itself, and which rep- 

 resent the final stage previous to their final de- 

 struction, has now been so frequently noticed 

 that I have put together in chronological order 

 what information in this direction from a " world 

 ayont " the meteorites have brought to us. 



1806. March 15th, 5 p. m. — Two stones, weigh- 

 ing together six kilogrammes, fell at Alais, departe- 

 ment du Gard, France. They have the appearanee 

 of an earthy variety of coal ; the color of the crust 

 is a dull brownish-black, so is that of the interior. 

 The structure is very soft and friable. When 

 heated it emits a faint bituminous odor. It was 

 examined at the time of its fall by Thenard and a 

 commission appointed by the Institute of France. 

 The French observers found it to contain 2.5 per 

 cent, of carbon ; while Berzelius, in 1834, esti- 

 mated the amount of carbon present to be 3.05 

 per cent. In 1862 Roscoe submitted this mete- 

 orite to a very thorough investigation. He found 

 the carbon present to amount to 3.36 per cent. 

 Ether dissolved 1.94 per cent, of the stone; the 

 solution on evaporation left crystals which have 

 an aromatic odor, and a fusing-point of 114 C, 

 and which sublime on the application of heat, 



