METEORS. 351 



proportioned to the rapidity of its diminution. Again as 

 it grows larger, it will appear to approach you. If it 

 expires by several flickerings or flashes, it will seem to 

 skip from you, and when it reappears you will easily 

 imagine that it has assumed a new position. 



It is sometimes thought that you cannot approach an 

 ignis fatuus ; that it will recede as rapidly as you ad- 

 vance. This is probably the effect of imagination. In 

 a misty night, a traveller easily mistakes one of these 

 lights, , for the light of a neighboring house, and going in 

 pursuit of it, he finds hedges and bogs and mire, till he 

 i> lead to the middle of a swamp. It is stated by Mr 

 Mitchell that a man left his neighbor's house late in the 

 evening and at daylight had not reached his own, a 

 quarter of a mile distant : at which his family being con- 

 cerned, a number of persons went out to search for him. 

 We found him near a swamp with soiled clothes, and a 

 thoughtful countenance, reclining by a fence: The ac- 

 count he gave way, that he had been led into the swamp 

 by a jack o' lantern. His story was no doubt true, and 

 yet had little of the marvellous in it. The night being 

 dark, and the man's senses a little disordered withal, by 

 a glass too much of his neighbor's cherry, on approaching 

 his house he saw a light, and not suspecting that it was 

 not upon his own mantel, made towards it. A bush or 

 bog might have led to the same place, if he had happened 

 to take it for his chimney top. These are some of these 

 marshy lights which cannot as yet be scientifically 

 explained. But repeated observations and successive 

 experiments are removing one difficulty after another^, 

 and the time may yet corne when the science of meteors 

 shall be as simple and satisfactory as any other which 

 elucidates the mvsteries of nature. 



