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The obvious suggestion is that they are among the products of the explosion which originated the planetoids, the aerolites, and the streams of meteors; and consideration of the probable circumstances shows us that such products might be expected.
With an inextinguishable ardour he observed aerolites, meteors, and fire-balls, and all the glowing ruins and blazing sparks which pass through the terrestrial atmosphere with prodigious speed, and as a reward for is studious vigils he received the indifference of the public, the ingratitude of the State and the blame of the learned societies.
A discussion began upon this subject, and Michel Ardan, always rich in explanations, gave out the opinion that the bullet, restrained by lunar attraction, would end by falling on the moon like an aërolite on to the surface of the terrestrial globe. "In the first place," answered Barbicane, "all aërolites do not fall upon the surface of the earth; only a small proportion do so.
These last, when they project any masses to the earth, are termed aërolites. Atmospheric electricity has much to do with the distribution of rain, the precipitation of vapor, the condition of our nervous system, and, according to Humboldt, with the circulation of the organic juices.
Aerolites, as they have been designated, have now been found in almost every region and climate of the globe from Arabia to the farthest point of Baffin's Bay; and this very circumstance would seem to be opposed to their aerial origin, unless we are to suppose that they can be formed in every state, and in the opposite extremes of the atmosphere.
At Araya, Cochen, and even in the island of Margareta it had rained abundantly; and those showers were remembered by the inhabitants in the same way as a fall of aerolites would be noted in the recollection of the naturalists of Europe. The Indian who was our guide scarcely knew in what direction we should find the alum; he was ignorant of its real position.
It was a sort of grotto they had discovered; and, crouching within it, they could laugh to scorn the storm that still came pouring from above; the stones, as they passed close to their faces, hissing and hurtling like aerolites. The rocky rain at length ended.
Those merry little brown twitterers that frequently shot across the sky, looking small as insects in the wide blue expanse, and ever and anon dropped swiftly down like showers of aerolites, to lose themselves in the grass and herbage, or perch singing on the topmost dead twigs of a bush, now existed in constant imminent danger not of that quick merciful destruction which Nature has for her weaklings, and for all that fail to reach her high standard; but of a worse fate, the prison life which is not Nature's ordinance, but one of the cunning larger Ape's abhorred inventions.
The meteoric hypothesis was naturally extended from the maintenance of the sun's heat to the formation of the bodies circling round him. The earth no less doubtless than the other planets is still growing. Cosmical matter in the shape of falling stars and aërolites, to the amount, adopting Professor Newton's estimate, of 100 tons daily, is swept up by it as it pursues its orbital round.
Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the crashes and screams were the sound of the missiles on their unlighted way.
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