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Of course they had not long to wait scarce a second for the huge bundles bounding on, each moment with increased impetus, came down with the suddenness of a thunderclap; and before the words "Jack Robinson" could have been pronounced, they went whizzing past with the velocity of aerolites, and with such a force, that had one of them struck either mule or pony it would have hurled both the quadruped and its rider to the bottom of the mountain.
Read the antique documents extricated, analysed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of these skyey sentences, aerolites, which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which not your experience but the man within the breast has accepted as words of fate, and tell me if they match if the former account in any manner for the latter; or which gives the most historical insight into the man.
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.
Further support for the hypothesis is yielded by aerolites, so various in their kinds, but all suggestive of a planet's crust; by the streams of shooting stars having their radiant points variously placed in the heavens; and also by the solitary shooting stars visible to the naked eye, and the more numerous ones visible through telescopes.
In fact, when Saturn was a good deal younger than he is now, he may have had a lot more rings and no moons, and now these aerolites, or whatever they are, can't come together and make moons, because they've got too solid." Meanwhile the Astronef was rapidly approaching that portion of Saturn's surface which was illuminated by the rays of the Sun, streaming under the lower arch of the inner ring.
As far back as the days of the Greek civilization it was known empirically that "stones can fall from the sky." Falls of aërolites are recorded in the most ancient Chinese chronicles. In the Middle Ages and in modern times intimations of the fall of aërolites have increased in frequency. Nevertheless, the phenomenon was not admitted by men of science until the eighteenth century.
You may trace a common motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek architecture, and in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following centuries, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven.
I think the aerolites are as interesting as anything in this department, and one piece of pure iron, laid against the wall of the room, weighs about fourteen hundred pounds. Whence could it have come? If these aerolites are bits of other planets, how happen they to be always iron? But I know no more of this than if I were a philosopher.
Such a mistake was undoubtedly the cause of the late visitation of Pallas' sand-grouse: owing perhaps to some unusual atmospheric or dynamic condition, or to some change in the nervous system of the birds, they deviated widely from their usual route, to scatter in countless thousands over the whole of Europe and perish slowly in climates not suited to them; while others, overpassing the cold strange continent, sped on over colder, stranger seas, to drop at last like aerolites, quenching their lives in the waves.
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