In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Aristotle and other ancient writers regarded comets as meteors generated in the atmosphere. This opinion was generally accepted, even by the learned, until the observations of Tycho, near the close of the sixteenth century, showed those mysterious objects to be more distant than the moon, thus raising them to the dignity of _celestial_ bodies. An achievement somewhat similar, and certainly no less interesting, was reserved for the astronomers of the _nineteenth_ century. This was the great discovery that _shooting-stars, fire-balls, and meteoric stones, are, like comets, cosmical bodie…
Your support pays for translating these classics into more languages.
Support for $12/month DonateSubscribers read with instant translation, without waiting for the free daily limit.