121 CELESTIAL PHENOMENA. 





general force of rotation, and are precipitated not only upon 

 inhabited countries, but also beyond them in the ocean, so 

 that they are not found/' Diogenes of Apollonia ( 88 ) ex- 

 presses himself still more clearly. According to him, 

 " together with the visible stars there move other in- 

 visible ones, which are therefore without names. These 

 not unfrequently fall to the earth and become extinguished, 

 like the star of stone which fell in flames at ^Egos Potamos/' 

 The Apollonian, who regarded all other stars (i. e. the 

 luminous ones) as pumice-like bodies, probably founded his 

 opinion respecting shooting stars and meteoric stones on 

 the doctrine of Anaxagoras of Clazomene, who imagined all 

 celestial bodies to be mineral masses which the fiery ether 

 in its impetuous course had torn from the earth, inflamed, 

 and converted into stars. The Ionic school, therefore, 

 with Diogenes of Apollonia, placed aerolites, and stars or 

 heavenly bodies, in one and the same class : both, indeed, 

 were alike regarded as of telluric origin, but this was in the 

 view of all having been once formed from the earth, and 

 having taken their places round her as a central body ( 89 ) ; 

 precisely as, according to modern ideas, the planets of a 

 system are conceived to have been formed around the cen- 

 tral body or sun, and from its once extended atmosphere. This 

 view is not, therefore, to be confounded with that usually 

 implied in what is called the telluric or atmospheric origin 

 of meteoric stones; or with the extraordinary notion of 

 Aristotle, who supposed the enormous mass of JEigos Pota- 

 mos to have been carried up by a tempestuous wind. 



A presumptuous scepticism, which rejects facts without 

 examination of their truth, is in some respects even more 

 injurious than an unquestioning credulity; it is the tendency 



