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Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769-1859

"COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1"



[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 ?®gos 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, a?‘rolites 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.


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