AEROLITES. 123 



quently have no name, move in space together with those 

 that are visible. These invisible stars frequently fall to the 

 earth and are extinguished, as the stony star which fell burn- 

 ing at ^Egos Potamos." The Apollonian, who held all other 

 stellar bodies when luminous to be of a pumice-like nature, 

 probably grounded his opinions regarding shooting stars and 

 meteoric masses on the doctrine of Anaxagoras the Clazome- 

 nian, who regarded all the bodies in the universe " as fragments 

 of rocks, which the fiery ether in the force of its gyratory 

 motion had torn from the Earth and converted into stars." 

 Tn the Ionian school, therefore, according to the testimony 

 transmitted to us in the views of Diogenes of Apollonia, aero- 

 lites and stars were ranged in one and the same class : both, 

 when considered with reference to their primary origin, being 

 equally telluric, this being understood only so far as the earth 

 was then regarded as a central body,* forming all things 

 around it in the same manner as we, according to our present 

 views, suppose the planets of our system to have originated 

 in the expanded atmosphere of another central body the 

 Sun. These views must not, therefore, be confounded with 

 what is commonly termed the telluric or atmospheric origin 

 of meteoric stones, nor yet with the singular opinion of Aris- 

 totle, which supposed the enormous mass of ./Egos Potamos 

 to have been raised by a hurricane. That arrogant spirit 

 of incredulity, which rejects facts without attempting to in- 

 vestigate them, is in seme cases almost more injurious than 

 an unquestioning credulity. Both are alike detrimental to the 

 force of investigation. Notwithstanding that for more than 



* The remarkable passage in Plut., de plac. Philos., ii. 13, runs thus: 

 " Anaxagoras teaches that the surrounding ether is a fiery substance, 

 which by the power of its rotation tears rocks from the earth, inflames 

 them, and converts them into stars." Applying an ancient fable to il- 

 lustrate a physical dogma, the Cla/omenian appears to have ascribed the 

 fall of the Nemean Lion to the Peloponnesus from the Moon to such a 

 rotatory or centrifugal force. (Julian., xii. 7 ; Plut., de facie in orbe Lunce, 

 c. 24; Schol. ex Cod. Paris, in Apoll. Argon., lib. i. p. 498, ed. Schaef., 

 t ii. p. 40; Meineke, Annal. Alex., 1843, p. 85.) Here instead of 

 stones from the Moon we have an animal from the Moon ! According 

 10 an acute remark of Bb'ckh, the ancient mythology of the Nemaeaa 

 lunar lion has an astronomical origin, and is symbolically connected in 

 chronology with the cycle of intercalation of 'the lunar year, with the 

 moon-worshii at Nemaea, and the aramea by which it waa accompanied, 



