Nevil Story Maskelyne

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”