last foot of dry land will sink
for the last time beneath the water, the last mountain-peak melting
away, and our globe, lapsing like any other organism into its second
childhood, will be on the surface--as presumably it was before the first
continent rose--one vast "waste of waters." As puny man conceives time
and things, an awful cycle will have lapsed; in the sweep of the cosmic
life, a pulse-beat will have throbbed.

V. THE NEW SCIENCE OF METEOROLOGY

METEORITES

"An astonishing miracle has just occurred in our district," wrote M.
Marais, a worthy if undistinguished citizen of France, from his home at
L'Aigle, under date of "the 13th Floreal, year 11"--a date which outside
of France would be interpreted as meaning May 3, 1803. This "miracle"
was the appearance of a "fireball" in broad daylight--"perhaps it was
wildfire," says the naive chronicle--which "hung over the meadow," being
seen by many people, and then exploded with a loud sound, scattering
thousands of stony fragments over the surface of a territory some miles
in extent.

Such a "miracle" could not have been announced at a more opportune time.
For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question
whether such a form of lightning as that reported--appearing in a clear
sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts--had real existence. Such
cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts"
themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and
those who doubted their authenticity had been chided as having "an
evil heart of unbelief." But scientific scepticism had questioned the
evidence, and late in the eighteenth century a consensus of opinion
in the French Academy had declined to admit that such stones had been
"conveyed to the earth by lightning," let alone any more miraculous
agency.

In 1802, however, Edward Howard had read a paper before the Royal
Society in which, after reviewing the evidence recently put forward,
he had reached the conclusion that the fall of stones from the sky,
sometimes or always accompanied by lightning, must be admitted as
an actual phenomenon, however inexplicable. So now, when the great
stone-fall at L'Aigle was announced, the French Academy made haste to
send the brilliant young physicist Jean Baptiste Biot to investigate
it, that the matter might, if possible, be set finally at rest.
The investigation was in all respects successful, and Biot's report
transferred the stony