AEROLITES. 115 



nave been liiirled from one of these moving clouds. In less 

 frequent cases, as in that which occurred on the 16th of Sep- 

 tember, 1843, at Kleinwenden, near Miililhausen, a large 

 aerolite fell with a thundering crash while the sky was clear 

 and cloudless. The intimate affinity between fire-balls and 

 shooting stars is further proved by the fact that fire-balls, from 

 which meteoric stones have been thrown, have occasionally 

 been found, as at Angers, on the 9th of June, 1822, having a 

 iiameter scarcely equal to that of the small fire-works called 

 Eloraan candles. 



The formative power, and the nature of the physical and 

 chemical processes involved in these phenomena, are questions 

 ill equally shrouded in mystery, and we are as yet ignorant 

 tvdiether the particles composing the dense mass of meteoric 

 itones are originally, as in comets, separated from one another 

 \n the form of vapor, and only condensed v/ithin the fiery ball 

 when they become luminous to our sight, or whether, in the 

 ease of smaller shooting stars, any compact substance actually 

 Tails, or, finally, whether a meteor is composed only of a smoke- 

 like dust, "containing iron and nickel ; while w^e are wholly 

 ignorant of what takes place within the dark cloud from which 

 a noise like thunder is often heard for many minutes before 

 the stones fall.* 



* Oil meteoric dust, see Arago, in the Annuaire for 1832, p. 254. 1 

 have very recently endeavored to show, in another work {Asie Centrale, 

 t. i., p. 408), how the Scythian saga of the sacred gold, which fell burn- 

 ing from heaven, and remained in'the possession of the Golden Horde 

 of the ParalattB (Herod., iv., 5-7), probably originated in the vague rec- 

 ollection of the fall of an aSrolite. The ancients had also some strange 

 fictions (Dio Cassius, Ixxv., 1259) of silver which had fallen from heav- 

 en, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Seve- 

 rus, to cover bronze coins ; metallic iron was, however, known to exist 

 hi meteoric stones. (Plin., ii., 56.) The frequently-recui'ring expres- 

 sion lapidibus phiit must not always be understood to refer to falls of 

 aSrolites. In Liv., xxv., 7, it probably refers to pumice (rapil/i) eject- 

 ed from the volcano, Mount Albanus (Monte Cavo), which vC-as not 

 wholly extinguished at the time. (See Heyne, Opuscula Acad., t. iii., 

 p. 261 ; and my Relation Hist., t. i., p. 394.) The contest of Hercules 

 with the Ligyans, on the road from the Caucasus to the Hesperides, 

 belongs to a different sphere of ideas, being an attempt to explain myth- 

 ically the origin of the round quartz blocks in the Ligyan field of stones 

 at the mouth of the Rhone, which Aristotle supposes to have been eject- 

 ed from a fissure during an earthquake, and Posidonius to have been 

 caused by the force of the waves of an inland piece of water. In the 

 fragments that we still possess of the play of ^Eschylus, the Promeihetis 

 Delivered, every thing proceeds, however, in part of the narration, as 

 in a fall of aerolites, for Jupiter draws together a cloud, and causes the 

 "district around to be covered by a shower of round stones " Posido- 



