Crossword-Solution: TELLURIC 8 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

Mid acorn-laden oaks Would they refresh their bodies for the nonce; And the wild berries of the arbute-tree, Which now thou seest to ripen purple-red In winter time, the old telluric soil Would bear then more abundant and more big.

The more, then, the telluric ground is drained Of heat, the colder grows the water hid Within the earth.

What, then's, the principle? Why, this, indeed: The earth about that spring is porous more Than elsewhere the telluric ground, and be Many the seeds of fire hard by the water; On this account, when night with dew-fraught shades Hath whelmed the earth, anon the earth deep down Grows chill, contracts; and thuswise squeezes out Into the spring what seeds she holds of fire (As one might squeeze with fist), which render hot The touch and steam of the fluid.

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.

Some conservative meteorologists kept up the argument for the telluric origin for some decades to come, as a matter of course--such a band trails always in the rear of progress.