Nevil Story Maskelyne

“ That it will be solved no scientific mind can doubt, though the conditions necessary may prove to be very difficult to fulfil. It is possible that carbon, like metallic arsenic, passes directly into the condition of vapor from that of a solid, and that the condition for its sublimation in the form of crystals, or its cooling into crystal diamond from the liquid state, is one involving a combination of high temperature and high pressure present in the depths of the earth’s crust, but very difficult to establish in a laboratory experiment. ”

“ The diamond excels all substances in hardness. Its crystals belong to the cubic system, and should not, therefore, present the property of doubly refracting light. Frequently, however, from the influence of strains within the crystal due to inclosed gas bubbles, or other causes, diamonds are not entirely without action on a ray of polarized light sent through them. Finally, the diamond is pure carbon, and, as such, burns entirely away when heated to a sufficiently high temperature in the air, and more vividly so burns, or rather glows away, when heated in oxygen gas. ”

“ From time to time these contending conditions of volume may, as in a Prince Rupert's drop, produce explosion, the heated shell in the case of the meteorite flying off in fragments from the internally cold inner core, which if sufficient velocity remain to the mass will undergo a recurrence of the same conditions of surface fusion and explosion. The loudness of the detonation is also probably enhanced by the simultaneous collapse of the air on the vacuum that would follow the rapidly-moving mass. ”

“ It may, however, further be said that the tendency of scientific conviction is in the direction of recognizing the collection toward and concentration in definite centres, of the matter of the universe, as a cosmical law, rather than the opposite supposition of such centres being the sources whence matter is dispersed into space. ”

“ The explanation of the incrustation and of the cloud left by the meteorite, or out of which it seems to emerge, is found in the transformation into heat of the energy actuating a body that enters our atmosphere with a motion of 12 to 40 miles a second. ”

“ The cause of the violent and often successive explosions is probably to be sought in the expansion of the outer portions of the mass, while the interior retains the contracted volume due to the intense cold of space with which the meteorite enters the atmosphere. ”

“ When the mass is small—and in the case of meteoric showers and ordinary falling stars it cannot exceed a few ounces, and may often be but a few grains—the whole material is thus consumed, and must ultimately fall as an unperceived, because widely-scattered, dust. The meteorite is the residue that survives this wasting action where the magnitude of the mass is more considerable. ”

“ Whether meteorites move or do not move in circumsolar orbits is at present impossible to say; because, while with our incomplete knowledge we cannot to-day attach the character of periodicity to any known class of meteorites, we are not justified in founding any conclusion on a negative result with so limited a foundation. ”

“ The specimens I had to experiment upon were too light to possess appreciable weight, too small even to see unless by very good eyesight or with a lens, yet were, nevertheless, sufficiently large to answer the three questions suggested by the above properties. ”

“ That this matter, whether intercepted or not by the planets and the sun, should to an ever-increasing amount become entangled in the web of solar and planetary attraction, and that the same operation should be collecting round other stars and in distant systems such moving "clouds" of star-dust as have been treated by Schiaparelli, Leverrier, and other astronomers, or individual masses of wandering stone or iron, is a necessary deduction from the view that we have assumed regarding the tendency of cosmical matter to collect toward centres. ”

“ In physical as well as in chemical characters aërolites resemble at the first aspect some terrestrial volcanic rocks.
The minerals of which they are composed are nearly entirely crystalline, as is evinced by the colors in polarized light of such as are transparent. These minerals are usually aggregated with slight cohesion, and they present in by far the greatest number of cases a peculiar spherular or "chondritic" structure. ”