CH. xxxi. METEORS. 297 



and the Agreement of two of these with the Orbits of Re- 

 turning Comets, 1862. Everyone has heard of falling or 

 shooting-stars, and most people have probably seen one or 

 more of these bright meteors rush across the sky on a calm 

 summer evening, and then vanish as suddenly as it appeared. 

 The rude Lithuanian peasants have a touching legend about 

 these falling stars. 'To every new-born child,' they say, 

 * there is attached an invisible thread, and this thread ends 

 in a star ; when that child dies the thread breaks, and 

 the light of the star is quenched as it falls to the earth.' 

 Science has taught us a different, but a not less wonderful 

 history. It is now known that these meteors are solid 

 stones, 'pocket planets' as Humboldt called them, which 

 travel round the sun in the opposite direction to that in 

 which we are going. When we meet them they rush through 

 our atmosphere so fast that they become heated, and give out 

 light for a short time till they are burst into fine dust and 

 vanish. When they are too large to be consumed before 

 they reach the earth, they fall, often with great violence, and 

 are split into countless fragments. A large collection of 

 these meteoric stones is to be seen in the British Museum, 

 some weighing hundreds of pounds, others only a few grains. 

 They have been analysed, and are found to be composed 

 chiefly of iron, tin, sulphur, olivine, and oxygen. 



Before the present century all that was known about these 

 bodies was very vague and unsatisfactory. From time to time 

 accounts of stone-falls came from different parts of the world, 

 but they were not much attended to, and people found it 

 difficult to believe that stones and mineral masses actually 

 fell from the sky on to the earth. But in 1803 a fiery globe 

 was seen to rush over the town of Aigle, in Normandy, and a 

 stony mass was dashed to the ground and shattered into 



