43 



SHOOTING STARS AND AEROLITES. 



ing in the meteoric stone of Chantonnay, in 

 La Vendee, which, on the other hand — and 

 this is equally rare — exhibits pores and vesicu- 

 lar cavities like the meteoric ston% of Juvenas. 

 In every instance the black crust is as sharply 

 separated from the clear gray mass, as is the 

 dark-coloured crust or varnish of the white 

 granite blocks which I brought from the cata- 

 racts of the Orinoko("), and which are also met 

 with by the side of other cataracts in different 

 quarters of the globe — those of the Nile, the 

 Congo, &c. It is impossible to produce any- 

 thing in the strongest heat of the porcelain 

 furnace which shall be so distinct from the un- 

 altered matter beneath, as is the crust of aero- 

 lites from their general mass. Some, indeed, 

 will have it that here and there indications of 

 penetration of fragments, as if by kneading, 

 appear ; but in general the condition of the 

 mass, the absence of flattening from the fall, 

 and the not very remarkable heat of the mete- 

 oric stone, when touched immediately after its 

 fall, indicate nothing like a state of fusion of 

 the interior during the rapid passage from the 

 limits of the atmosphere to the earth. 



The chemical elements of which meteoric 

 masses consist, upon which Berzelius has 

 thrown so much light, are the same as those 

 which we encounter scattered through the 

 crust of the earth. They consist of eight met- 

 als (iron, nickel, cobalt, manganese, chrome, 

 copper, arsenic, and tin) ; five earths ; potash 

 and soda ; sulphur, phosporus, and carbon ; in 

 all, one-third of the entire number of simple 

 substances at present known. Despite this 

 similarity to the ultimate elements into which 

 inorganic bodies are chemically decomposable, 

 the appearance of meteoric masses has still 

 something that is generally strange to us ; the 

 kind of combination of the elements is unlike 

 all that our terrestrial mountain and rocky 

 masses exhibit. The native iron, which is met 

 with in almost the whole of them, gives them 

 a peculiar, but not therefore a lunar character ; 

 for, in other regions of space, in other plane- 

 tary bodies besides the moon, water may be 

 entirely wanting, and processes of oxidation 

 may be rare. 



The cosmic gelatinous vesicles, the nostoc- 

 like organic masses, which have been attribu- 

 ted to shooting stars ever since the middle 

 ages, and the pyrites of Sterlitamak (westward 

 from the Ural Mountains), which have been 

 said to be composed of hail-stones in the inte- 

 rior, belong to the fables of meteorology(*=^). 

 It is only the finely granular texture, only the 

 mixture of olivine, augite, and labrador spar("), 

 of some aerolites, of the doloritic-looking mass 

 of Juvenas in Ardeche, for example, that gives 

 them somewhat more of an indigenous charac- 

 ter, as G. Rose has shown. These aerolites, 

 indeed, contain crystalline substances exactly 

 similar to those of the crust of our Earth ; and 

 in Pallas's Siberian mass of meteoric iron, the 

 olivine is only distinguished by the absence 

 of nickel, which is there replaced by oxide of 

 tin(**). As meteoric olivine, like that of our 

 basalt, contains from 47 to 49 per cent, of mag- 

 nesia, and this earth, according to Berzelius, 

 generally constitutes one-half of the earthy in- 

 gredients of aerolites, we must not be astor- 

 ished at the large quantity of silicate of mag- 



nesia which we find in these cosmic masses. 

 If the aerolite of Juvenas contains separable 

 crystals of augite and labrador, it is at least 

 probable, from the numerical relations of the 

 ingredients, that the meteoric mass of Cha- 

 teau-Renard is a diorite composed of horn- 

 blende and albite, and those of Blansko and 

 Chantonnay of hornblende and labrador. The 

 indications of a telluric or atmospheric origin 

 of aerolites, which have been derived from the 

 oryctognostic resemblances just mentioned, do 

 not appear to me of any great weight. Where- 

 fore should not — and here I might refer to a 

 remarkable conversation between Newton and 

 Conduit at Kensington(^*) — wherefore should 

 not the matter belonging to a particular cluster 

 of celestial bodies, to the same planetary sys- 

 tem, be for the major part the same 1 Why 

 should it not be so, when we feel at liberty to 

 surmise that these planets, like all larger and 

 smaller conglobated masses which revolve 

 about the sun, have separated from particular 

 and formerly much more widely-expanded sun- 

 atmospheres, as from vaporous rings, and 

 which originally held their courses round the 

 central bodyl We are not, I believe, more 

 authorized to regard nickel and iron, olivine 

 and pyroxene (augite), which we find in me- 

 teoric stones, as exclusively terrestrial, than I 

 should have been had I indicated the German 

 plants which I found beyond the Obi, as Euro- 

 pean species of the flora of northern Asia. If 

 the elementary matters in a group of planetary 

 bodies of various magnitudes be identical, why 

 should they not also, in harmony with their 

 several affinities, run into determinate combi- 

 nations — in the polar circle of Mars, into white 

 and brilliant snow and ice ; in other smaller 

 cosmic masses into mineral species that con- 

 tain crystalline, augite, olivine, and labrador 1 

 Even in the region of the merely Conjectu- 

 ral, the unbridled caprice that despises all in- 

 duction must not be suffered to control opin- 

 ion. 



The extraordinary obscurations of the sun 

 which have occasionally taken place, during 

 which the stars became visible at mid-day (as 

 in the three days' darkness of the year 1547, 

 about the time of the fateful battle near Miihl- 

 berg), and which are not explicable on the sup- 

 position of a cloud of volcanic ashes, or of a 

 dense dry-fog, were ascribed by Kepler, at one 

 time, to a materia cometica, at another to a 

 black cloud, the product of sooty exhalations 

 from the sun's body. The observations of 

 shorter periods of darkness — of three and six 

 hours, in the years 1090 and 1203— Chladni 

 and Schnurrer have explained by the passage 

 of meteoric masses. And since the stream of 

 shooting stars from the direction of its orbit 

 has been regarded as forming a closed ilwg, 

 the epochs of these mysterious celestial phe- 

 nomena have been brought into a remarkable 

 connection with the regularly recurring show- 

 ers of shooting stars. Adolph Erman has, 

 with great acuteness, and after a careful analy- 

 sis of all the data collected up to the present 

 time, directed the attention of philosophers to 

 the coincidence of the conjunction with the 

 sun, as well of the August asteroids (7th of 

 February) as of the November asteroids (12th 

 of May), at the epoch which coincides with 



