METEOBS AND AEROLITES. 269 



Greek and Latin poets (Lucretius very especially), which, 

 though in some part ambiguous from the association of light- 

 ning with meteoric appearances, yet manifestly include the 

 latter in their description.* The historians of antiquity 

 denote them in more or less detail, and with various degrees 

 of belief. The naturalists of Greece and Kome, from Aristotle 

 down to Seneca and Pliny, have not only left descriptions 

 copious enough to identify all the appearances with those 

 of our own time, but have here and there offered suggestions 

 as to natural causes which are fairly admissible among the 

 hypotheses of more recent date. 



But the highest interest in these records of past times 

 attaches itself to the fall of Aerolites ; and as we propose to 

 take this class of meteors first into view, we may reasonably 

 dwell for a moment upon their early history. The phrases of 

 Lapidibus pluit Crebri ceciderunt a ccelo lapides, &c., are 

 familiar to us from Livy, and may no longer be disregarded 

 as the idle tales of a superstitious age. ^Eschylus, in the 

 fragment we possess of his Prometheus Unbound, alludes to 

 a shower of rounded stones sent down by Jupiter from a 

 cloud. But the most remarkable and authentic record of 

 antiquity is that of the massive stone which fell in the 78th 

 Olympiad (about the time of the birth of Socrates) at ^Egos- 

 potamos on the Hellespont ; the place soon afterwards dig- 

 nified or defaced, as opinion may be, by that naval victory 

 of Lysander which subjected Athens and Grreece for a time 

 to the Spartan power. The philosopher Anaxagoras was said 

 to have predicted the fall of this stone from the sun ; a 



* Virgil, in the more practical description of his Georgics, connects falling 

 stars with the approach of wind 



Ssepe etiam stellas, vento impendente, videbis 



Praecipites ccelo labi, &c. 



Both Theophrastus and Pliny admit the same idea. If this connection were 

 generally true, which we doubt, it probably depends merely on the rising wind 

 dispelling vapours which before hid these meteors from sight. 



