AEUOLITES. Ill 



of the larger cosmical bodies of our solar system, it is only 

 in what is subject to calculation and to geometric measure- 

 ment that we feel ourselves on safe or solid ground. As 

 early as 1686, Halley pronounced the great ball of fire seen 

 in that year, the movement of which was opposite to that of 

 the Earth in her orbit( 64 ), a cosmical phenomenon; but it was 

 not until 1794, that Chladni, with remarkable acuteness, 

 recognised the general connection between fire-balls and those 

 stones which had been known to fall through the air, and 

 the motion of the former bodies in space ( 65 ). A brilliant con- 

 firmation of this view of the cosmical origin of these phseno- 

 mena has since been furnished by Denison Olmsted, of New- 

 haven in Massachusetts, who, from the concurrent testimony 

 of all the observers of the celebrated fall of meteors, or shoot- 

 ing stars, which took place on the 12th or loth of November, 

 1833, has shewn, that all these bodies, whether fire-balls or 

 shooting stars, proceeded from the same quarter of the 

 heavens, i. e. from a point near the star y Leonis, and that 

 this continued to be the point, although in the time during 

 which the phsenomenon was observed, the star materially 

 altered both its apparent altitude and azimuth. This inde- 

 pendence of the earth's rotation showed that the luminous 

 bodies came from without, i. e. that they entered our atmo- 

 sphere from the external regions of space. From Encke's 

 computation ( 66 ) of the whole of the observations which were 

 made in the United States of North America, between the 

 latitudes of 35 and 42, it follows that these meteors 

 all proceeded from the point in space towards which the 

 motion of the Earth was then directed. In the subsequent 

 great falls of shooting stars in the month of November, 



observed in 1831- and 1837 in North Am erica, and in 1S3S 

 VOL. i. K 



