2y6 SHOOTING STARS. 



been able to see of these shooting stars, leads me to infer that our 

 knowledge of this branch is crude, primitive, and scanty in the 

 extreme. The latest catalogue of meteor showers contains the 

 positions of some 200 such systems, but in this catalogue a method 

 was adopted of condensing and simplifying the results that cannot 

 be long continued. In cases where several showers came near 

 together in date and position, they were averaged and called one 

 system 3 but it will be very desirable that in future the details shall 

 be kept separate, and I am confident that at no very distant day we 

 shall have to reckon these meteor streams by thousands, and 

 perhaps by tens of thousands ! There will be a difficulty in dealing 

 with so many systems and keeping them separate, but the nature 

 of the subject requires that it should be done. It is astonishing 

 how many of these meteoric fragments enter our atmosphere and 

 are consumed by it every year. We cannot give the exact numbers, 

 but from what has been seen we may judge of that unseen. By 

 my observations of "2259 shooting stars during the last six months 

 of 1877, ^ calculated that the actual number which fell into the 

 earth's atmosphere at this particular station, day and night, was 

 237,000. This refers to those as bright as or brighter than 

 5th magnitude stars. The number smaller than this and those 

 that never took fire at all must have been infinitely greater. It 

 should also be remembered that observers at widely different 

 stations, each sees an entirely different set of shooting stars, so 

 that the number above mentioned as visible, here represents but 

 a small fractional part of the aggregate rain of meteors that entered 

 our atmosphere in all parts of the world. Rarely indeed one of 

 them penetrates the air deep enough to fall on the ground in a 

 mass. They are consumed and rapidly dispersed into cosmical 

 dust which probably subsides gradually and harmlessly towards 

 the earth's surface. Evidence of this has been furnished by the 

 fact that snow in the Alps has been found to contain globules of 

 iron, and the dust that has accumulated through generations in 

 the towers of cathedrals, and other elevated places, contains 



