134 COSMOS. 



the opinion of some physicists, not eruptions of the ethero'EU 

 fire extinguished in the air immediately after its ignition, nor 

 yet an inflammatory combustion of the air, which is dissolved 

 in large quantities in the upper regions of space, but these 

 meteors are rather a fall of celestial bodies, which, in conse- 

 quence of a certain intermission in the rotatory force, and by 

 the impulse of some irregular movement, have been hurled 

 down not only to the inhabited portions of the Earth, but 

 also beyond it into the great ocean, where we can not find 

 them." Diogenes of Apollonia* expresses himself still more 

 explicitly. According to his views, " Stars that are invisible, 

 and, consequently, 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 stofiij star which fell 

 burning at ^gos 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 

 Clazomenian, 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 con- 

 verted into stars." In the Ionian school, therefore, according 

 to the testimony transmitted to us in the views of Diogenes 

 of Apollonia, aerolites 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,f 



same person as Da'imachos of Plataea, who was sent by Seleucus to 

 India to the son of Androcottos, and who was charged by Strabo with 

 being "a speaker of lies" (p. 70, Casaub.). From another passage of 

 Plutarch {Compar. Solonis c. Cop., cap. 5) we should almost believe 

 that he was. At all events, we have here only the evidence of a very 

 late author, who wrote a century and a half after the fall of aerolites 

 occurred in Thrace, and whose authenticity is also doubted by Plutarch. 



"* Stob., ed. Heeren, i., 25, p. 508 ; Plut., de plac. Pkilos., ii., 13. 



t The remarkable passage in Plut., deplac. 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 Clazomenian appears to have ascribed 

 the fall of the Nemaean Lion to the Peloponnesus from the Moon to 

 Buch a rotatory or centrifugal force. (iElian., xii., 7; Plut., de Facie 

 in Orbe Lunce,' c. 24 ; Schol. ex Cod. Paris., in Apoll. Argon., lib. i., 

 p. 498, ed. Schaef., t. n., p. 40; Meineke, Annal. Alex., 1843, p. 85.) 

 Here, instead of stones from the Moon, we have an animal fi'om the 

 Moon! According to an acute remark of BSckh, the ancient mythol. 

 ogy of the Nemaean lunar lion has an astronomical origin, and is sym- 



