ORIGIN OF METEORITES — BERWERTH. 315 



(telrtites) which are conceived by Franz Suess to be meteorites are 

 glass meteorites from the moon. 



For the sake of justice I must also mention that the lunar hj'pothe- 

 sis had a predecessor in the writer Paolo Maria Terzago, who, in the 

 description (1660) of the fall of a stone at Milan in 1650, at which a 

 Franciscan monk was killed, expressed the opinion that the " moon 

 was the cause of the falling of the stones." 



The idea, according to which meteorites were formed out of con- 

 stituents of the atmosphere, was held only so long as their com- 

 position was yet little known. It was soon seen that iron, nickel, 

 chromium, silica, etc., could not be contained in the air, and Klap- 

 roth noted also that iron would necessarily be oxidized under these 

 conditions. Many other reasons, such as the occurrence of the fire- 

 balls at a great height, their velocity, and occurrence at all times 

 of the day and year, among other things, early withdrew^ every sup- 

 port from the hypothesis of the origin of meteoric masses in the 

 atmosphere. 



Of longer duration was the theory of their terrestrial origin — that 

 is, that they had a connection with the formation of the earth — 

 even though not the ejecta of volcanoes (with which, indeed, thej^ 

 do not entirely coincide). A terrestrial derivation in this sense 

 was ascribed to meteorites by Lagrange and later by Tisseraud. 

 According to this they are said to have been thrown out of the in- 

 terior of our planet in the dim early ages with so great force that 

 they were carried beyond the limit of its attraction to form a ring 

 about it, like that of Saturn, out of which fragments fall to the 

 earth again. Such a conception with somewhat different foundation 

 we shall find later held by V. Goldschmidt. 



Little reference is made to meteorites by astronomers at the be- 

 ginning of the last century. The books on astronomy of those times 

 contain nothing at all about fireballs. Even Bode in his " Introduc- 

 tion to the Knowledge of the Starry Heavens" (1823) devotes only 

 the following lines to our subject: 



The so-called flyin.2: dragon, the leaping goat (capra saltans), torches, burn- 

 ing beams, and other shining meteors probably have the same nature and 

 consistency in part as the falling stones, and are only distinguished from them 

 in size and shape. Partly they may also consist of thick and viscous vapors of 

 the lower air, which give off a phosphorescent light through a decomposition 

 of their original materials and are blown away by the wind in all sorts of 

 chance forms and shapes. 



Astronomic hypotheses as to the origin of meteorites did not de- 

 velop until a much later time, and took their rise from the idea that 

 meteorites, shooting stars, and comets were all of the same character. 

 Schiaparelli in 1871 suggested important reasons for the connection 

 between the three kinds of phenomena, reasons which were also 



