3 o8 NINETEENTH CENTURY. PT. ill. 



mandy, and a stony mass was dashed to the ground and 

 shattered into thousands of fragments, some of which weighed 

 as much as 17^ Ibs. This created so much astonishment 

 that the French Government sent M. Biot, a celebrated 

 French chemist, to examine into the matter, and he reported 

 that there could be no doubt of a shower of hot stones 

 having fallen upon the earth. 



From this time more interest was taken in meteors and 

 meteoric stones. People had remarked for a long time that 

 shooting-stars were more abundant from the Qth to the 1 1 th 

 of August than at other times, and more lately it was also 

 noticed that a shower of the same kind happens about the 

 1 3th of November. Astronomers began, therefore, to think 

 that these meteors must move in regular orbits, crossing 

 the orbit of our earth in certain places, so that we pass 

 through them. There were also reasons for thinking that 

 the November meteors travelled in an enormous ellipse, 

 passing at one end even outside the planet Uranus. 



It was not, however, till thirteen years ago that anything 

 was really known. In the year 1862 an Italian astronomer 

 named Schiaparelli made a very remarkable suggestion. 

 He noticed that a comet which was seen in that year crossed 

 the earth's path just at the point where we are always in 

 the middle of the meteor-shower on August 10, and it oc- 

 curred to him whether it might not be possible that the 

 August meteors were travelling in the same orbit as the 

 comet. His suggestion turned out to be correct, and by a 

 calculation which we cannot follow here, he proved that the 

 comet and the August meteors travel along precisely the same 

 path in the shape of a long ellipse passing at one end out- 

 side the planet Neptune, the most distant of the known 

 planets. This was the first time that the orbit of any set 

 of meteors had been traced out. 



