THE NEW SCIENCE OF METEOROLOGY 



eighteenth century a consensus of opinion in the French 

 Academy had declined to admit that such stones had 

 been "conveyed to the earth by lightning," let alone 

 any more miraculous agency. 



In 1802, however, Edward Howard had read a paper 

 before the Royal Society in which, after reviewing the 

 evidence recently put forward, he had reached the con- 

 clusion that the fall of stones from the sky, sometimes 

 or always accompanied by lightning, must be admitted 

 as an actual phenomenon, however inexplicable. So 

 now, when the great stone-fall at L'Aigle was an- 

 nounced, the French Academy made haste to send the 

 brilliant young physicist Jean Baptiste Biot to investi- 

 gate it, that the matter might, if possible, be set finally 

 at rest. The investigation was in all respects success- 

 ful, and Biot's report transferred the stony or metallic 

 lightning-bolt the aerolite or meteorite from the realm 

 of tradition and conjecture to that of accepted science. 



But how explain this strange phenomenon? At 

 once speculation was rife. One theory contended 

 that the stony masses had not actually fallen, but had 

 been formed from the earth by the action of the light- 

 ning; but this contention was early abandoned. The 

 chemists were disposed to believe that the aerolites had 

 been formed by the combination of elements floating in 

 the upper atmosphere. Geologists, on the other hand, 

 thought them of terrestrial origin, urging that they 

 might have been thrown up by volcanoes. The as- 

 tronomers, as represented by Olbers and Laplace, mod- 

 ified this theory by suggesting that the stones might, 

 indeed, have been cast out by volcanoes, but by vol- 

 canoes situated not on the earth, but on the moon. 



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