or metallic lightning-bolt--the aerolite or
meteorite--from the realm of tradition and conjecture to that of
accepted science.

But how explain this strange phenomenon? At once speculation was rife.
One theory contended that the stony masses had not actually fallen, but
had been formed from the earth by the action of the lightning; but this
contention was early abandoned. The chemists were disposed to believe
that the aerolites had been formed by the combination of elements
floating in the upper atmosphere. Geologists, on the other hand, thought
them of terrestrial origin, urging that they might have been thrown up
by volcanoes. The astronomers, as represented by Olbers and Laplace,
modified this theory by suggesting that the stones might, indeed, have
been cast out by volcanoes, but by volcanoes situated not on the earth,
but on the moon.

And one speculator of the time took a step even more daring, urging that
the aerolites were neither of telluric nor selenitic origin, nor yet
children of the sun, as the old Greeks had, many of them, contended,
but that they are visitants from the depths of cosmic space. This bold
speculator was the distinguished German physicist Ernst F. F. Chladni,
a man of no small repute in his day. As early as 1794 he urged his
cosmical theory of meteorites, when the very existence of meteorites was
denied by most scientists. And he did more: he declared his belief
that these falling stones were really one in origin and kind with those
flashing meteors of the upper atmosphere which are familiar everywhere
as "shooting-stars."

Each of these coruscating meteors, he affirmed, must tell of the
ignition of a bit of cosmic matter entering the earth's atmosphere. Such
wandering bits of matter might be the fragments of shattered worlds, or,
as Chladni thought more probable, merely aggregations of "world stuff"
never hitherto connected with any large planetary mass.

Naturally enough, so unique a view met with very scant favor.
Astronomers at that time saw little to justify it; and the
non-scientific world rejected it with fervor as being "atheistic and
heretical," because its acceptance would seem to imply that the universe
is not a perfect mechanism.

Some light was thrown on the moot point presently by the observations of
Brandes and Benzenberg, which tended to show that falling-stars travel
at an actual speed of from fifteen to ninety miles a second. This
observation tended to discredit the s