A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



And one speculator of the time took a step even 

 more daring, urging that the aerolites were neither of 

 telluric nor selenitic origin, nor yet children of the sun, 

 as the old Greeks had, many of them, contended, but 

 that they are visitants from the depths of cosmic space. 

 This bold speculator was the distinguished German 

 physicist Ernst F. F. Chladni, a man of no small repute 

 in his day. As early as 1794 he urged his cosmical 

 theory of meteorites, when the very existence of me- 

 teorites was denied by most scientists. And he did 

 more: he 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 

 justify 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 ob- 

 servation tended to discredit the selenitic theory, since 



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