COSMICAL GEOLOGY. 163 



Gilbert regards them as impressions made upon the moon by 

 the collision of gigantic meteorites. 



More recently, Schmick, George Darwin, and Ebert have 

 endeavoured to trace the surface conformation of the moon to 

 the undulations of a magma originally in hot, flowing con- 

 dition. Suess has also elucidated the present surface of the 

 moon upon the basis of volcanic occurrences; he compares 

 lunar surface forms with the internal seething and buoyancy of 

 melted masses of mineral or metallic material, and in this way 

 sets forth a genetic table of the various lunar forms. 



Meteorites and Falling Stars. Reports of stones and masses 

 of iron fallen from the heavens may be traced into remote 

 periods of antiquity. The oldest known account is a report in 

 China in the year 644 B.C. The Phoenicians, Egyptians, and 

 Greeks used to preserve meteor-stones in temples, and to do 

 honour to them as visible signs sent them by their gods. 



Pliny has recounted how at y^Egos Potamos, in Thracia, in 

 the year 476 B.C., a mass of iron fell, "as large as a chariot," 

 and was afterwards said by Anaxagoras to have been a frag- 

 ment broken from the sun. 



Avicenna mentions reports of fallen stones from Egypt and 

 Persia. There seems little doubt, according to Consul von 

 Laurin (1845), tnat tne sacred stone in the Kaaba of Mecca is 

 a meteorite. Various accounts of meteorkes in Germany date 

 from the early Middle Ages. A fall of meteorites took place 

 at Ensisheim, in Alsace, on the yth November 1492, and the 

 account describes how a hot mass of stone, 127 kilogrammes 

 in weight, fell into a field of wheat, accompanied by violent 

 noises and the appearance of fire. Emperor Maximilian I. 

 commanded that the stone should be preserved in the Church 

 of Ensisheim. During the French Revolution the stone was 

 laken to Colmar, and was then considerably cut down, so that 

 now the remnant returned to the Ensisheim church only weighs 

 about 40 kilogrammes. 



A full report was also given of a shower of meteorites that 

 occurred at Crema, in Italy, in 1510 or 1511. Although the 

 number of reports of fallen stones increased very greatly in 

 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the scientific opinion 

 of that time made merry over the credulity of the people who 

 imagined the stones fell from the heavens. 



Stiitz, for example, who was a director of the Natural History 



