[footnote] *Plut., 'Vitæ par, in Lysandro', cap. 22. The statement of Damachos (Daïmachos), that for seventy days continuously there was a fiery cloud seen in the sky, emitting sparks like falling stars, and which then, sinking nearer to the earth, let fall the stone of Ægos Potamos, "which, however, was only a small part of it," is extremely improbable, since the direction and velocity of the fire-cloud would in that case of necessity have to remain for so many days the same as those of the earth; and this, in the fire-ball of the 19th of July, 1686, described by Halley ('Trans.', vol. xxix., p. 163), lasted only a few minutes. It is not altogether certain whether Daïmachos, the writer, [Greek words], was the same person as Daïmachos of Platæa, who was sent by Selencus to India to the son of Androcottos, and who ws charged by Strabo with being "a speaker of lies" (p. 70, Casaub.). From another passage of Plutarch ('Compar. Solonis c. Cop.', cap. 5) we should almost believe that he was. At all events, we have here only the evidence of a very late author, who wrote a century and a half after the fall of aërolites occurred in Thrace, and whose authenticity is also doubted by Plutarch. Diogenes of Apollonia* expresses himself still more explicitly. [footnote] *Stob., ed. Heeren, i., 25, p. 508; Plut., 'de plac. Philos.', ii., 13. According to his views, "Stars that are 'invisible', and, consequently, have no name, move in space together with those that are visible. These invisible stars frequently fall burning at Ægos Potamos." The Apollonian, who held all other stellar bodies, when luminous, to be of a pumice-like nature, probably grounded his opinions regarding shooting stars and meteoric masses on the doctrine of Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, who regarded all the bodies in the universe "as fragments of rocks, which the fiery ether, in the force of its gyratory motion, had torn from the Earth and converted into stars." In the Ionian school, therefore, according to the testimony transmitted to us in the views of Diogenes of Apollonia, aërolites and stars were ranged in one and the same class; both, when considered with reference to their primary origin, being equally telluric, this being understood only so far as the Earth was then regarded as a central body,* p 135 forming all things around it in the same manner was we, according to our present views, suppose the planets of our system to have originated in the expanded atmosphere of another central body, the Sun.