He says, in a memoir entitled 'Mus??um Septalianum,
Manfredi Septal??, Patricii Mediolanensis, industrioso labore constructum'
(Tortona, 1664, p. 44), "Labant philosophorum mentes sub horum lapidum
ponderibus; ni dicire velimus, lunan terram alteram, sine mundum esse, ex
cujus montibus divisa frustra in inferiorem nostrum hunc orben dela bantur."
Without any previous knowledge of this conjecture, Olbers was led, in the
year 1795 (after the celebrated fall at Siena on the 16th of June, 1794),
into an investigation of the amount of the initial tangential force that
would be requisite to bring to the Earth masses projected from the Moon.
This ballistic problem occupied, during ten or twelve years, the attention
of the geometricians Laplace, Biot, Brandes, and Poisson. The opinion which
was then so prevalent, but which has since been abandoned, of the existence
of active volcanoes in the Moon, where air and water are absent, led to a
confusion in the minds of the generality of persons between mathematical
possibilities and physical probabilities. Olbers, Brandes, and Chladni
thought "that the velocity of 16 to 32 miles, with which fire-balls and
shooting stars entered our atmosphere," furnished a refutation to the view
of their selenic origin.
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