METEOES AND AEROLITES. 295 



Association, and published in their Annual Keports.* Pro- 

 fessing to be merely a continuation of Quetelet's Catalogue, 

 and to form a nucleus for future collection, it is in itself a 

 most copious and valuable register of these phenomena. 

 We will not call it complete, because no record of these 

 vagrant and fugitive appearances can be so. We do not, for 

 instance, find noted in the Eeport for 1851 a very remark- 

 able meteor, the appearance and disruption of which, on the 

 30th September, 1850, were witnessed at the Observatory 

 at Cambridge, in Massachusets ; and which has been fully 

 described by Mr. Bond, the then distinguished astronomer 

 of that university.f But many of these lacunce will be 

 filled up ; and meanwhile the catalogue is ample enough to 

 furnish an admirable basis for future observation. 



We have noted the frequent connection of these bright 

 meteors with falling stones ; and this is, in truth, the question 

 of greatest interest regarding them. Are they really asso- 

 ciated with some form of matter analogous to that of known 

 aerolites, but which escapes detection, either by falling out 

 of human sight, or by the passage forwards of the meteor in 



* Since this article was published, a valuable addition to the history of Me- 

 teors and Aerolites has been made by a Eeport to the British Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, in 1860 ; in which a Catalogue is given (carefully com- 

 piled, and largely illustrated by collateral facts and authorities) of all such 

 appearances, from the commencement of the Christian era to our own time. 

 Mr. E. P. Greg, the author of this valuable Catalogue, has printed it separately, 

 as well as one or two other Memoirs on the same subject. 



f By a happy accident, I was present with Mr. Bond in the Harvard Ob- 

 servatory on the night, and at the moment, when this splendid meteor ap- 

 peared and burst, followed by appearances not usually described. The most 

 striking circumstances attending the phenomenon were, the long time (more 

 than an hour) during which the nebulous light was visible after the explosion 

 the great distinctness of the nucleus, an elongated luminous space being 

 projected, as it were, ahead of it the perfectly cometary figure and aspect of 

 the meteor a quarter of an hour after its first appearance, a fact strongly ad- 

 verted to by Mr. Bond and the rotary motion of the luminous elongation 

 amounting to nearly 90 within twenty minutes, and producing a sort of whorl, 

 resembling some of the nebulae so beautifully depictured from Lord Eosse's late 

 observations. 



