RURICOLA OX THE AUROltA BOREALIS. 367 



interval, especially within the last ten years in this neighbourhood, and 

 in Dublin, and most of all in the northern part of the county of An- 

 trim, near the coast of the great northern ocean. Your correspondent 

 from Dundee, I perceive, states himself to have made his observations 

 upon it on no less than ten different occasions between August 13, 

 1828, and March 21, 1833, being not quite five years. However, this 

 is out of the way of my proposed object in the present communication, 

 which was to lay before your readers sufficient evidence of the Aurora 

 Borealis having appeared, and of its appearance having been recorded 

 by our annalists and other writers long and often before the period to 

 which it has been inadvertently, I apprehend, and improperly assigned. 

 In the foregoing inquiry I have confined myself to the subject as 

 connected with our own writers. If the Aurora Borealis has not been 

 noticed by the writers of classical antiquity, the omission is easily 

 accounted for by their remoteness from the climates where it might be 

 expected to appear. There are those, however, who are of opinion that 

 it has not been unnoticed even by such writers. In illustration of the 

 martial character attributed by our old annalists to the phenomenon, 

 and of its being thought predictive of great political events, Dr. 

 Pegge has cited a passage from the first Georgic of Virgil, where the 

 poet, enumerating the several prodigies that preceded and betokened 

 the death of Julius Caesar, mentions a sound of arms in the sky, 

 heard, not in Italy, but in the more northern regions of Europe. 



" Armorum sonitum toto Germania ccelo 

 Audiit." 



" The noise of battle hurtling in the air 

 Germania heard." 



Upon which passage Heyne, in his edition of Virgil, notes that " Arms 

 are often related to have been seen in the sky, a superstition which 

 appears to have derived its origin from the Aurora Borealis." And 

 the late Professor Martyn, in his translation and notes to the Georgics, 

 having remarked that " Ovid speaks of the clashing of arms and the 

 noise of trumpets and horns," and that " Appian also mentions great 

 shouts in the air, and clashing of arms, and rushing of horses," adds 

 " Perhaps this was some remarkable Aurora Borealis seen about that 

 time in Germany. The learned M. Celsius, professor of astronomy at 

 Upsal in Sweden, has assured me that in those northern parts of the 

 world, during the appearance of an Aurora Borealis, he has heard a 

 rushing sound in the air, something like the clapping of a bird's wings 



