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Down below in the darkness were Ottershaw and Chertsey and all their hundreds of people, sleeping in peace. He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress.
"I remember," answered Thorwald, "I was just asking you what theory you of the earth hold on that important topic." "If the doctor," I said, "will pardon me, I will say, in relation to the origin of meteorites, that our scientific men have held from time to time many different theories.
When explanations of their presence were sought, they were supposed to have been deposited by ancestors or other beings, sometimes as depositories of their souls. Meteorites, having fallen from the sky, needed no other explanation.
Was it possible that one of the stars had fallen from overhead to take up its abode on the earth? Had one of the streamers of fire that criss-crossed the sky landed on the sand to flicker out its life? No! The stars above flashed as insolently as ever and their piercing shafts of light were of a steel-blue color; the meteorites still streaked their orange-red trails across the curtain of black.
We have spoken of the rings as being composed of meteorites, but perhaps their component particles may be so small as to answer more closely to the definition of dust.
And, however improbable it seems, it is undoubtedly true that masses of matter do crash down upon the earth from time to time, and these are called meteorites. When we think of the great expanse of the oceans, of the ice round the poles, and of the desert wastes, we know that for every one of such bodies seen to fall many more must have fallen unseen by any human being.
It is believed that the meteors are merely lesser fragments of the same kind of materials as the planets, circling independently round the sun; and a proof of this is that far more meteorites fall on that part of the earth which is facing forward in its journey than on that behind, and this is what we should expect if the meteors were scattered independently through space and it was by reason of our movements that we came in contact with them.
"You have told me," he said, "of some of your earlier beliefs about the origin of meteorites. Have you any more modern views?" To this the doctor replied: "If my friend here has really finished talking for a while I will say, Thorwald, that the theories already spoken of seem to be disproved by the discovery that these stones enter the earth's atmosphere with a planetary velocity.
The meteorites known as "The Woman" and "The Dog" were secured with comparative ease, and the work of getting the large seventy-ton meteor, known as "The Tent," into such a position as to insure our securing it the following summer, was done, so it was not strange that the following summer I was again in Greenland, but the meteorite was not brought away that season.
The cult of stones, meteorites and concretions such as these of the Little Palace, has been widespread in all ages; one has only to remember the black stone which forms the most sacred treasure of Mecca, the black stone which stood in the Temple of the Great Mother at Rome, and the image of the great goddess Diana at Ephesus, 'which fell down from Jupiter. Hesiod's story of how Kronos or Saturn devoured a stone under the belief that he was swallowing the infant Zeus evidently belongs to the recollections of a worship in which such natural idols as these were adored.
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