THE 

 LONDON, EDINBURGH and DUBLIN 



PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE 



AND 



JOURNAL OF SCIENCE* ~_ 



$ S ' LOS DOTS ^> 

 [THIRD SERIES.] jf^^rfj 



JULY 1846. ****. J &%. 



I. O/i //if Satellitarij Nature of Shooting Stars and Aerolites. 

 By H. E. Strickland, M.A., F.G.S.* 



T N the truly philosophic work Cosmos, in which the pro- 

 -* found Humboldt embodies the results of his life-long studies, 

 he expresses some opinions on the subject of shooting stars, 

 which there appears to me considerable difficulty in adopting. 

 If we assume with him that the observations of Benzenberg 

 and Brandes on the parallax of shooting stars are correct, it 

 appears that these bodies have a velocity of from 1 7 to 36 

 geographical miles per second, that their elevation above the 

 earth is from 16 to 14-0 geographical miles, and their diame- 

 ters from 80 to 2600 feet. It may further be taken for 

 granted, that these bodies revolve in orbits according to the 

 laws of gravitation, that they are ordinarily invisible, but be- 

 come momentarily luminous whenever they plunge into the 

 earth's atmosphere ; and that aerolites are fragments projected 

 or swept from these asteroids (possibly by the resistance of 

 the atmosphere), and hurled to the earth by terrestrial attrac- 

 tion. 



Admitting these premises, the next question is to determine 

 the nature of the orbits in which these mysterious bodies re- 

 volve, and the influences to which they are subjected in their 

 course. Humboldt here adopts the opinion first propounded 

 by Chladni, that shooting stars and meteors are planetary 

 bodies revolving round the sun in elliptic orbits, and only 

 rendered visible to us at the nodes, where the orbits of the 

 earth and of these asteroids intersect. Their number on this 

 view of the subject must be prodigious, as it is only those 

 whose orbits happen to traverse the earth's orbit, and which 



* Read before the Ashmolean Society of Oxford, March 1846, and com- 

 municated by the Author. 



Phil. Mag. S. 3. Vol. 29. No. 1 9 1 . July 1 846. B 



