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an extraordinary fall at L’Aigle in France. The accounts of it 
were greeted with ridicule, but the French Government appointed 
a Commission to inquire into the circumstances, and the cele- 
brated Biot reported that about 2,000 stones had undoubtedly 
fallen from the sky. Soon afterwards it was shown that these 
stones possessed characters and included substances which had 
never been observed in the rocks of the earth. Jt was Chladni, 
however, who just a hundred years ago, in Germany, first asserted 
the extra-terrestrial origin of these bodies, rescued them from in- 
difference and neglect, and insisted on the enormous importance 
of their study. 
We have all of us (proceeded Mr. Pankhurst) seen what are 
termed “ shooting stars.’ These are small bodies, which, enter- 
ing our atmosphere with a velocity of 20 or 30 miles a second, 
are burned up by the heat engendered by their very friction 
against the gaseous particles or atoms of the air, It is calculated 
that at least 20 millions of these bodies enter our atmosphere 
every 24 hours; and on some days of the year a vastly greater 
number. It may have been the good fortune of some of us to 
see the landscape suddenly lit up by an intense brilliancy, and, on 
directing our eyes to the sky, to observe an apparently large body 
moving swifting through the heavens, burning witha beautiful red 
or green light, and leaving behind it a long luminous trail. This 
we calla meteor. It is but a larger shooting star, and it is in 
such as these that our interest centres this evening. Sometimes 
they reach the earth only partly consumed. These are the true 
thunderbolts of the gods. It is these which have been in all ages 
an object of fear or worship to multitudes of men. Sometimes, 
as in Rome, they have been the centre and focus of the religion 
of a nation. They are objects of devotion now to semi-barbarous 
races, who know not what it is they ignorantly worship, and in 
more enlightened nations to enthusiastic collectors who gloat in 
secret over their accumulated treasures. 
The greatest devotee of a meteorite, ignorant or scientific, 
would scarcely choose, however, to be in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood when one of a large size arrived on the earth. Their 
advent is generally accompanied with a roar of thunderous 
detonations like the discharge of a park of artillery. ‘The 
firmest houses,” says an eye witness of a fall, “‘were shaken to 
their foundations, and thousands of sleepers aroused in an instant. 
People awake at the time were startled to see the night suddenly 
lighted into day, and again relapse into darkness.” More than 
once they have been seen to be red hot when they touched the 
earth. So different is their velocity on different occasions, that 
while sometimes they bury themselves several feet in the gound, 
at others, stones a pound or two in weight have bounded from ice 
four inches thick without breaking it. The detonations are 
