Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/89

Rh In physical as well as in chemical characters aërolites resemble at the first aspect some terrestrial volcanic rocks.

The minerals of which they are composed are nearly entirely crystalline, as is evinced by the colors in polarized light of such as are transparent. These minerals are usually aggregated with slight cohesion, and they present in by far the greatest number of cases a peculiar spherular or "chondritic" structure.

In these the spherules are composed of similar minerals to those which enclose them, and even contain metallic iron sometimes in microscopically fine grains disseminated through them.

A section of an aërolite was exhibited by the microscope in which some of the spherules had been broken before being cemented by the surrounding mass, and in another fissures were seen which had been filled with a fused material after one side of the fissure had slidden along the other; facts pointing to events in the history of the meteorite subsequent to its first formation.

The chemical composition and the mineral constitution of aerolites were illustrated by tables showing the elements met with in these bodies, and the minerals in which they were distributed. The former comprised about one-third of the known elements; among them magnesium, iron, silicon, oxygen, and sulphur, were conspicuous; calcium, aluminium, nickel, carbon, and phosphorus, coming next in importance, the basic elements of most importance by their amount being the same as those which are found by spectroscopic analysis to be present in the sun—and in those stars which have been the best examined.

The minerals most frequent in aërolites besides nickeliferous iron or troilite (iron monosulphide) and graphite, are bronzite (a ferriferous enstatite) and olivine, both of the latter being essentially magnesium silicates. Augite and anorthite also occur (more particularly in the eukritic aerolites of Rose) and some minerals unknown in terrestrial mineralogy have also been met with; such are the different varieties of Schreibersite (phosphides of iron and nickel); calcium sulphide, asmanite (a form of silica crystallizing in the orthorhombic system and having the specific gravity of fused quartz), and a cubic mineral with the composition of labradorite. The crystalline form of bronzite was first determined from the crystals in a meteorite, and was found to confirm the conclusion Descloizeaux had arrived at as regards its system from observations on the distribution of the optic axes in the terrestrial bronzite and enstatite.

The question as to whence the meteorites come is one that we are not yet in a position to answer with certainty. The various hypotheses which suppose for them an origin in lunar volcanoes, or in our atmosphere, or again in a destroyed telluric satellite, or that would treat them as fragments of an original planet of which the asteroids are parts, or as masses ejected from the sun; all these hypotheses seem to