Such a "miracle" could not have been announced at a more opportune time. For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question whether such a form of lightning as that reported--appearing in a clear sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts--had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their authenticity had been chided as having "an evil heart of unbelief." But scientific scepticism had questioned the evidence, and late in the eighteenth century a consensus of opinion in the French Academy had declined to admit that such stones had been "conveyed to the earth by lightning," let alone any more miraculous agency. In 1802, however, Edward Howard had read a paper before the Royal Society in which, after reviewing the evidence recently put forward, he had reached the conclusion that the fall of stones from the sky, sometimes or always accompanied by lightning, must be admitted as an actual phenomenon, however inexplicable. So now, when the great stone-fall at L'Aigle was announced, the French Academy made haste to send the brilliant young physicist Jean Baptiste Biot to investigate it, that the matter might, if possible, be set finally at rest. The investigation was in all respects successful, and Biot's report transferred the stony or metallic lightning-bolt--the aerolite or meteorite--from the realm of tradition and conjecture to that of accepted science. But how explain this strange phenomenon? At once speculation was rife. One theory contended that the stony masses had not actually fallen, but had been formed from the earth by the action of the lightning; but this contention was early abandoned. The chemists were disposed to believe that the aerolites had been formed by the combination of elements floating in the upper atmosphere. Geologists, on the other hand, thought them of terrestrial origin, urging that they might have been thrown up by volcanoes. The astronomers, as represented by Olbers and Laplace, modified this theory by suggesting that the stones might, indeed, have been cast out by volcanoes, but by volcanoes situated not on the earth, but on the moon. 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. As early as 1794 he urged his cosmical theory of meteorites, when the very existence of meteorites was denied by most scientists. And he did more: he declared his belief that these falling stones were really one in origin and kind with those flashing meteors of the upper atmosphere which are familiar everywhere as "shooting-stars."