Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/754

 In trying to interest you in this subject, so remote from the studies of most of you, I rely upon your sense of the unity of all science, and at the same time upon the strong hold which these weird bodies have ever had upon the imaginations of men. In ancient times temples were built over the meteorite images that fell down from Jupiter, and divine worship was paid them, and in these later days a meteorite stone that fell last year in India became the object of daily anointings and other ceremonial worship. In the fearful imagery of the Apocalypse the terrors are deepened by there falling "from heaven a great star burning as a torch," and by the stars of heaven falling "unto the earth as a fig-tree casteth her unripe figs when she is shaken of a great wind." The "great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads seven diadems" is presented in the form of a huge fire-ball. "His tail draweth the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth." Records of these feared visitors, under the name of flying dragons, are found all through the pages of the monkish chroniclers of the middle ages. The Chinese appointed officers to record the passage of meteors and comets, for they were thought to have somewhat to say to the weal or woe of rulers and people.

By gaining in these later days a sure place in science, these bodies have lost their terrors, but so much of our knowledge about them is fragmentary, and there is still so much that is mysterious, that men have loved to speculate about their origin, their functions, and their relations to other bodies in the solar system. It has been easy, and quite common, too, to make these bodies the cause of all kinds of things for which other causes could not be found.

They came from the moon; they came from the earth's volcanoes; they came from the sun; they came from Jupiter and the other planets; they came from the comets; they came from the nebulous mass from which the solar system has grown; they came from the fixed stars; they came from the depth of space. They supply the sun with his radiant energy; they give the moon her accelerated motion; they break in pieces heavenly bodies; they threw up the mountains on the moon; they made large gifts to our geologic strata; they cause the auroras; they give regular and irregular changes to our weather. A comparative geology has been built up from the relations of the earth's rocks to the meteorites; a large list of new animal forms has been named from their concretions; and the possible introduction of life to our planet has been credited to them. They are satellites of the earth; they travel in streams, and in groups, and in isolated orbits about the sun; they travel in groups and singly through stellar spaces; it is they that reflect the zodiacal light; they constitute the tails of comets; the solar corona is due to them; the long coronal rays are meteor-streams seen edgewise.

Nearly all of these ideas have been urged by men deservedly of