GEOLOGY.—MEMOIR? NO. IIL 
« The light of ages 'past, developes light in tho»e 
succeeding —“ ad 
St. Louis, June 24th,.1818.. 
Having about a year since, decided in 
my own mind, on Uie geometrical necessi¬ 
ty of all planets being hollow, and consist¬ 
ing of separate concentric spheres involv¬ 
ed within each other ; like laws led me on 
the 19th December, 1817, at Pass Chris¬ 
tiana, (Gulf of Mexico,) to decide, that the 
rotation which throws the matter wide 
from the centre, would throw it some de- 
o-rees from the poles, and thus produce 
polar openings, about the axis of the 
spheres, the principles of which, are con¬ 
tained in my second memoir. 
1 On the 16th of last January, near Mo¬ 
bile, a fire-ball burst, that an instant be¬ 
fore projected a cone of fire from each 
pole horizontally, and at right angles with 
its course. Its bursting like a bomb-shell, 
showed it to be hollow,—the two cones of 
light besides its tail, showed it was then 
open at the poles : I therefore deemed it 
a little erratiek planet, or comet. This 
was the first fact I found confirming my 
new positions. 
The fire-ball that fell in Connecticut in 
1807, produced three distinct reports in 
rapid succession, and it made three con¬ 
vulsive leaps in its course, appearing less 
and less luminous at each of the two first 
convulsions, or throes, and disappearing 
with the third ; and three parcels of stone 
fell on the earth;—the second parcel five 
miles from the first, and the last parcel 
three or four miles from the second : This 
showed it consisted of three concentric 
spheres. It came from northwardly—the 
fragments lay in a N. E. and S. W. di¬ 
rection. Some of the sooty crusted sur¬ 
faces of the fragments appeared concave. 
This fire-ball was probably a transparent 
fluid, until it fell so low as to condense, 
and yield free heat, and it ultimately 
burst, because the heated air within 
could no longer bubble through the 
spheres from their mid-plane or volcanic 
space, owing to the fluid of the spheres, 
having successively condensed and crys¬ 
talled. The hard white globules of feld- 
