386 Mr Galloway on Shooting-Stars and Meteors. 



d' exploitation des mines d'houille aux charges d'explosion." 

 I undertook this question, and was so fortunate as to see 

 my memoir crowned by the Academy. The greater part of 

 my experiments were enumerated in that memoir, but another 

 portion of them made during this year is now for the first time 

 published. As the experiments in the Prussian coal-mines are 

 still going on, I shall have occasion for farther communications 

 on a subject so important for the interests of humanity. 



Remarks on the Present Slate of our Knowledge relative to 

 Shooting-Stars, and on the Determination of Differences of 

 Longitude from Observations of those Meteors. ByJVIr Gal- 

 loway. 



At the meeting of the Astronomical Society of the 8th 

 January 1841, Mr Galloway read a communication on this 

 subject. 



Earlier Opinions. — After adverting to some of the earlier 

 opinions which have been entertained on the nature of fire- 

 balls, shooting- stars, and other igneous meteors, the author 

 remarks, that no very definite theory was formed respecting 

 them till towards the end of the last century ; for although the 

 cosmical origin of the more remarkable bolides and fire-balls 

 had been suspected, the shooting-stars were generally regarded 

 as atmospherical phenomena, which were ascribed by some to 

 electricity, and by others to the inflammation of hydrogen gas 

 accumulated in the higher regions of the atmosphere. 



Chladni's Views. — In 1794, Chladni published his celebrated 

 work, in which he gave a catalogue of all the recorded obser- 

 vations of fire-balls ; and, from a comparison of the different 

 descriptions, inferred that these meteors have not their origin 

 in our atmosphere, but are cosmical masses moving through 

 the planetary spaces with velocities equal to those of the pla- 

 nets, which, when they encounter the earth's atmosphere, are 

 inflamed by the resistance and friction, and become luminous, 

 sometimes bursting into pieces, and scattering masses of stone 

 and iron on the ground. This opinion was at first greatly ri- 

 diculed ; but the repeated and even not unfrequent fall of me- 

 teoric stones, and the discovery by Howard that all of them 



