Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/68

44 The stones are much lighter than the iron, their specific gravities being as 3 to 7 or 8 for the metallic. The stones, therefore, came from a more superficial layer of the body torn apart than the iron, and the composition of their occluded gases bears this out. Those in the stones are such as we may conceive absorbed nearer the surface, those in the iron from regions deeper down.

Here, then, the meteorites tell us of another, an earlier, stage of our solar system's history, one that mounts back to before even the nebula arose to which we owe our birth. For the large body to whose dismemberment the meteorites were due can have been no other than the one whose cataclysmic shattering produced that very nebula which was for us the origin of things. The meteorites, by continuing unchanged, link the present to that far-off past. And they tell us, too, that this body must have been dark. For solid, they inform us, it was, and solidity in a heavenly body means deficiency of light.

That such corroborative testimony to a cataclysmic origin is forthcoming in the sky we shall see by turning again to the spiral nebulæ.

Of the two classes of nebulæ which we contemplated in the last chapter, the amorphous and the structural, there is more to be said than we touched on then.

Not only in look are the two quite unlike, but the