THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



declared his belief that these falling stones were really 

 one in origin and kind with those flashing meteors of 

 the upper atmosphere which are familiar everywhere as 

 " shooting-stars." 



Each of these coruscating meteors, he affirmed, must 

 tell of the ignition of a bit of cosmic matter entering 

 the earth's atmosphere. Such wandering bits of mat- 

 ter might be the fragments of shattered worlds, or, as 

 Chladni thought more probable, merely aggregations 

 of "world stuff" never hitherto connected with any 

 large planetary mass. 



Naturally enough, so unique a view met with very 

 scant favor. Astronomers at that time saw little to jus- 

 tify it; and the non-scientific world rejected it with 

 fervor as being " atheistic and heretical," because its 

 acceptance would seem to imply that the universe is not 

 a perfect mechanism. 



Some light was thrown on the moot point presently 

 by the observations of Brandes and Benzenberg, which 

 tended to show that falling-stars travel at an actual 

 speed of from fifteen to ninety miles a second. This 

 observation tended to discredit the selenic theory, since 

 an object, in order to acquire such speed in falling mere- 

 ly from the moon, must have been projected with an in- 

 itial velocity not conceivably to be given by any lunar 

 volcanic impulse. Moreover, there was a growing con- 

 viction that there are no active volcanoes on the moon, 

 and other considerations of the same tenor led to the 

 complete abandonment of the selenic theory. 



But the theory of telluric origin of aerolites was by 

 no means so easily disposed of. This was an epoch 

 when electrical phenomena were exciting unbounded 

 and universal interest, and there was a not unnatural 



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