AEROLITES. 97 



address themselves to reason and to meditative understanding 

 only, and not to the imagination or to a desponding condition 

 of mind, modern science has been accused, and not entirely 

 without reason, of not attempting to allay apprehensions which 

 it has been the very means of exciting. It is an inherent 

 attribute of the human mind to experience fear, and not hope 

 or joy, at the aspect of that which is unexpected and extraor- 

 dinary.* The strange form of a large comet, its faint nebulous 

 light, and its sudden appearance in the vault of heaven, have, 

 in all regions been almost invariably regarded by the people 

 at large as some new and formidable agent, inimical to the 

 existing state of things. The sudden occurrence and short 

 duration of the phenomenon lead to the belief of some equally 

 rapid reflection of its agency in terrestrial matters; whose 

 varied nature renders it easy to find events that may be re- 

 garded as the fulfilment of the evil foretold by the appearance 

 of these mysterious cosmical bodies. In our own day, how- 

 ever, the public mind has taken another and more cheerful, 

 although singular turn, with regard to comets; and in the 

 German vineyards in the beautiful valleys of the Rhine and 

 Moselle, a belief has arisen, ascribing to these once ill-omened 

 bodies, a beneficial influence on the ripening of the vine. The 

 evidence yielded by experience, of which there is no lack in 

 these days, when comets may so frequently be observed, has 

 not been able to shake the common belief in the meteorological 

 myth of the existence of wandering stars, capable of radiating 

 heat. 



From comets, I would pass to the consideration of a far 

 more enigmatical class of agglomerated matter the smallest 

 of all asteroids, to which we apply the name aerolites, or 

 meteoric stones,] when they reach our atmosphere in a frag- 

 mentary condition. If I should seem to dwell on the specific 



* Fries, Vorlesungen iiber die Sternkunde, 1833, s. 262-267 (Lee- 

 tures on the Science of Astronomy.) An infelicitously chosen instance 

 of the good omen of a coirtet may be found in Seneca, Nat. Qucest., vii. 

 17 and 21. The philosopher thus writes of the comet : " Quern nos Nt- 

 ronis prindpaiu Icetissimo vidimus et qui cometis detraxit infamiam" 



f [Much valuable information may be obtained regarding the origin 

 and composition of aerolites or meteoric stones in Memoirs on the sub- 

 ject, by Baumbeer and other writers, in the n<unbers of Poggenderf* 

 Annalen, from 1845 to the present time.] Tr. 



