NOTES ON THE BATH FURNACE AEROLITE. 201 



the same meteorite, weighing 170 pounds, fell two miles distant and 

 penetrated dry soil to a depth of only four and a half feet. 



Recalling the date of its fall we observe that Bath Furnace is one 

 of the Leonid shower of meteorites, whose stream the earth en- 

 counters yearly on November 14th and 15th. Although we seem 

 to have been deprived of the main group of this stream which for 

 many centuries passed us at intervals of ^^ years and was due in 

 1899, but which some astronomers tell us has been permanently di- 

 verted by the pull of Jupiter, we still have a smaller yet respectable 

 number appearing at the proper time. Possibly during the past 33 

 years the largest cluster of the stream has been dissipated and by 

 attenuation more evenly distributed along its track. In any case it is 

 interesting that so large a meteorite should have come to us in a 

 star-shower so feeble as that of Mid-November 1902. 



The rarity of a periodical star-shower furnishing meteorites to 

 our earth, or the rarity of a meteorite fall occurring at the same 

 date as the shower, has been frequently commented upon. The 

 Lyrids and Perseids have indeed given no case of this concurrence. 

 But the Andromedes gave us, Nov. 27, 1885, the siderite Mazapil. 

 The Leonids had already three meteorite falls to their credit 

 (Werchne Tzchirskaja, South Russia, 1843, Trenzano, Italy, 1856, 

 Saline Township, Kansas, 1898), when on November 15th, 1902, 

 Bath Furnace came hurtling down in a triple shower in the woods 

 of eastern Kentucky. Prof. Farrington in describing Saline Town- 

 ship had drawn attention to the fact of its similarity in the leading 

 features of its composition to the two previously fallen Leonids. 

 And now we add a fourth, Bath Furnace, which, like its three pre- 

 decessors is also a spheroidal Chrondrite, although of an interme- 

 diate type. The fine inductive work of Schiaparelli nearly half a 

 century ago discovered the close and unquestionable relationship of 

 the several periodic star-showers with different comets of known 

 orbits. Thus the Andromedes are linked with the Biela comet, fol- 

 lowing its track and dropping off, as we have seen, the Mexican 

 meteorite Mazapil as it came near our earth in 1885. And in same 

 manner the Leonids are linked to Tempel's comet, and have dropped 

 us four samples of the same in the last 61 years. H. A. Newton 

 and others have pointed out the fact that all the comets had origin- 

 ally long, elliptical orbits, and that most of them came to us from 

 interstellar space. Tempel's comet of 1866, which is responsible 



