448 SHOOTING STARS. [SECT, xxxvii. 



began at nine o'clock in the evening of the 12th of November 

 1 833, and lasted till sunrise next morning. It extended from 

 Niagara and the northern lakes of America to the south of 

 Jamaica, and from 61 of longitude in the Atlantic to 100 of 

 longitude in central Mexico. Shooting stars and meteors, of 

 the apparent size of Jupiter, Venus, and even the full moon, 

 darted in myriads towards the horizon, as if every star in the 

 heavens had started from their spheres. They are described 

 as having been frequent as flakes of snow in a snow-storm? 

 and to have been seen with equal brilliancy over the greater 

 part of the continent of North America. 



Those who witnessed this grand spectacle were surprised 

 to see that every one of the luminous bodies, without excep- 

 tion, moved in lines which converged in one point in the 

 heavens : none of them started from that point ; but their 

 paths, when traced backwards, met in it like rays in a focus, 

 and the manner of their fall showed that they descended from 

 it in nearly parallel straight lines towards the earth. 



By far the most extraordinary part of the whole pheno- 

 menon is, that this radiant point was observed to remain 

 stationary near the star y Leonis for more than two hours 

 and a half, which proved the source of the meteoric shower 

 to be altogether independent of the earth's rotation, and its 

 parallax showed it to be far above the atmosphere. 



As a body could not be actually at rest in that position, the 

 group or nebula must either have been moving round the earth 

 or the sun. Had it been moving about the earth, the course 

 of thq. meteors would have been tangential to its surface ; 

 whereas they fell almost perpendicularly, so that the earth in 

 its annual revolution must have met with the group. The 

 bodies or the parts of the nebula that were nearest must have 

 been attracted towards the earth by its gravity, and, as they 

 were estimated to' move at the rate of fourteen miles in a 

 second, they must have taken fire on entering our atmosphere, 

 and been consumed in their passage through it. 

 As all the circumstances of the phenomena were similar 



