On the Meteors of 13th November, 1833. 337 



The instantaneous and perfect development of the meteors indis- 

 criminately, whether large or minute, in places farther removed from 

 the common directrix in proportion as the paths were longer and the 

 flights more rapid could not but carry to the eye and the understanding 

 together the impression of an upper limiting surface in which these 

 sudden developements and orderly arrangements had their location. 

 In harmony with this impression the " dashes of light" with which 

 the smaller meteors marked the firmament and the bright bands of 

 fluid fire which lingered in the paths of the larger, and which in sever- 

 al instances we know to have collected into a cloud and float- 



4 



ed away to the east, could do no less than intimate as they vanished 

 that they owed existence to the substance, whether gaseous, fluid or 

 solid which the meteor, to its own extinction, had expended on the 

 neighboring air. Probably no one who actually witnessed the mete- 

 oric shower and has followed out these reflections will strongly ques- 

 tion that the meteors were each a distinct congeries of undefined 

 substance and owed their illumination and extinction to their own ra- 

 pid motion in the atmospheric medium which they entered. It may 

 be that the meteor by rapidly parting with its substance would be- 

 come at last exceedingly minute, and leave a train pointed at the 

 lower extremity : but the trains were so evanescent that, by the time the 

 meteor's course was finished, the far extremity had narrowed to a 

 point ; and thus these trains were left upon the sky in the similitude 

 of a filament of yellowish cloud tapering towards either extremity 

 like two very acute triangles united at the base. It was an observa- 

 tion of Mr. Palmer's that the point which faded last was not at the mid- 

 dle of the train but near two thirds of its length towards the part 

 where the meteor had vanished. 



Obs. 2nd. Some of the trains left by the meteors were so peculiar 

 in their aspects or remarkable in their changes, that a meteor seen at 

 different places might in some cases be known as one by means of its 

 train and thus data be obtained for calculation of the meteors height. 



Four meteors at least — one in each quarter of the United States 

 and which must have been distinct one from another, are known to 

 have given origin to a train which curled up into a luminous cloud and 



as it showed itself at West Point, must have been seen from Catskill and Pough- 

 keepsie, and the whole tract north and west even to Schenectady and Utica. This 

 remark is made in the hope of exciting individuals to attempt to rescue from ob- 

 livion the facts which may yet be ascertained respecting this meteor or any other. 



