SHOOTING STARS AND AEROLITES. 



41 



mond, in the neighbourhood of London. I have 

 also referred, in another work(**), to the re- 

 markable observation of Admiral Wrangel, 

 which he has confirmed to me verbally oftener 

 than once, that during the appearance of the 

 Northern Lights, on the Siberian shores of the 

 Icy Sea, certain regions of the heavens which 

 were not illuminated, became inflamed and 

 continued to glow whilst a shooting star pass- 

 ed through them. 



The different meteor-streams, each of them 

 made up of myriads of little planets, probably 

 intersect the orbit of our earth in the same 

 way as Biela's comet does. Upon this view 

 we may imagine these shoot-star asteroids as 

 forming a closed ring, and pursuing their course 

 in the same particular orbit. The smaller tel- 

 escopic planets between Mars and Jupiter, with 

 the exception of Pallas, present us, in their 

 closely connected orbits, with a similar rela- 

 tionship. It is impossible as yet to decide 

 whether alterations in the epochs at which the 

 stream becomes visible to us, whether retarda- 

 tions of the phenomenon, to which I long ago 

 directed attention, indicate a regular recession 

 or change of the nodes (the points of intersec- 

 tion of the earth's orbit and the ring), or wheth- 

 er from unequal clustering or very dissimilar 

 distances of the little bodies from each other, 

 the zone is of such considerable breadth, that 

 the earth only passes through it in the course 

 of several days. The lunar system of Saturn 

 likewise shows us a group of most intimately 

 associated planetary bodies of amazing breadth. 

 In this group, the orbit of the 7th or outermost 

 satellite, is of so considerable a diameter, that 

 the earth, in her orbit round the sun, would 

 take three days to pass over a space of like ex- 

 tent. Now, if we suppose that the asteroids 

 are unequally distributed in the course of one 

 of the closed rings which we picture to our- 

 selves as forming the orbits of the periodic cur- 

 rents, that there are but a few thickly congre- 

 gated groups such as would give the idea of 

 continuous streams, we can understand where- 

 fore such brilliant phenomena as those of No- 

 vember 1799 and 1833 are extremely rare. The 

 acute Gibers was inclined to announce the re- 

 turn of the grand spectacle, in which shooting 

 stars mixed with fire-balls should fall like a 

 shower of snow, for the 12th-14th of Novem- 

 ber, 1867. 



Hitherto the current of the November aste- 

 roids has only been visible over limited portions 

 of the earth's surface. It appeared, for exam- 

 ple, with great splendour in England in the 

 year 1837, as a meteoric shower ; whilst an 

 experienced and very attentive observer at 

 Braunsberg, in Prussia, saw nothing more than 

 a few scattered shooting stars in the course of 

 the same night, from seven o'clock in the 

 evening till sun-rise, the sky having continued 

 uninterruptedly clear the whole of the time. 

 Bessel concluded from this, " that a group of 

 the great ring which is occupied by these bod- 

 ies, of but limited extent, had approached the 

 earth over England, whilst districts to the east 

 passed through a relatively empty portion of 

 the ring"(*^). Should the idea of a regular pre- 

 cession or variation of the nodal lines, occa- 

 sioned by perturbations, acquire greater likeli- 

 hood, the discovery of older observations of the 

 F 



phenomenon would become a matter of partic- 

 ular interest. The Chinese annals, in which, 

 beside the appearance of comets, there are also 

 notices of gi^at showers of shooting stars, go 

 back beyond the time of Tyrtaeus, or the second 

 Messenic war. They describe two streams oc- 

 curring in the month of March, one of which 

 is 687 years older than the commencement of 

 the Christian era. Edward Biot has already 

 remarked, that among the fifty-two appearan- 

 ces which he finds recorded in the Chinese an- 

 nals, the most frequently recurring were those 

 that fell near the date from the 20th to the 22d 

 of July (old style), which may very possibly be 

 the now advanced stream occurring about the 

 time of the feast of St. Lawrence(*^). If the 

 great fall of shooting stars which Bogulawski, 

 jun., finds recorded in Benessius de Horowic's 

 " Chronicon Ecclesiae Pragensis," as having 

 been seen in full day light on the 21st of Octo- 

 ber, 1366 (old style), corresponds with our pres- 

 ent November fall, the precession in the course 

 of 447 years informs us that this shoot- star 

 system (that is to say, its common point of 

 gravity), describes a retrograde course about 

 the sun. It also follows, from the views now 

 developed, that when seasons pass by in which 

 neither of the streams as yet observed — that, 

 namely, of November and that of August — is 

 seen in any part of the earth, the reason of 

 this lies either in the interruption of the ring — 

 in other words, in the occurrence of gaps or 

 vacancies between the clusters of asteroids 

 that follow each other — or, as Poisson will 

 have it, in the influence which the larger plan- 

 ets exercise upon the form and position of the 

 ring(*^). 



The solid, heated, although not red-hot, mass- 

 es which are seen to fall to the earth from fire- 

 balls by night, from small dark clouds by day, 

 accompanied with loud noises, the sky being 

 generally clear at the time, show, on the whole, 

 a very obvious similarity, in point of external 

 form, in the character of their crust and the 

 chemical composition of their principal ingre- 

 dients. This they have maintained through 

 centuries, and in every region of the earth in 

 which they have been collected. But so re- 

 markable and early asserted a physiognomical 

 equality in these dense meteoric masses is 

 subject to many individual exceptions How 

 different are the readily forged masses of iron 

 of Hradschina, in the district of Agram, or that 

 of the banks of the Sisim, in the government 

 of Jenesiesk, which have become celebrated 

 through Pallas, or those which I brought with 

 me from Mexico(*'), all of which contain 96 per 

 cent, of iron, from the aerolites of Siena, which 

 scarcely contain 2 per cent, of this metal, from 

 the earthy meteoric stone of Alais (Dep. du 

 Gard), which crumbles when put into water, 

 and from those of Jonzac and Juvenas, which, 

 without metallic iron, contain a mixture of 

 oryctognostically distinguishable, crystalline 

 and distinct constituents ! These diversities 

 have led to the division of the cosmical masses 

 into two classes — nickeliferous meteoric iron, 

 and fine or coarse grained meteoric stones. 

 Highly characteristic is the crust, though it be 

 but a few tenths of a line in thickness, often 

 shining like pitch, and occasionally vemed("). 

 So far as I know, it has only been found want- 



