FIRE BALLS. 225 



in the dead of night all the vigour of a set of engines, 

 whose collective strength was equal to that of forty thou- 

 sand horses, was concentrated on the production of an 

 electric light ; suppose, further, that the dazzling glare 

 thus created was accompanied by the music from an 

 orchestra of fog-horns blown by another forty thousand 

 horses, surely a scare would be produced which the most 

 pretentious fire-ball might be content to emulate. Yet 

 the figures we have already given will prove that a meteor 

 Dnly ten pounds in weight, which a child could carry, 

 bears in the mere swiftness of its flight a capacity adequate 

 to such a display. 



The glory of a meteor is often so evanescent that we 

 just get a glimpse and it is gone. The sky resumes its 

 ordinary aspect ; the familiar stars are there, and even the 

 very situation of the brilliant streak has become unrecog- 

 nisable. But this is not always so ; it sometimes happens 

 that the brief career of the meteor leaves a notable trace 

 behind it, so that for seconds and for minutes the sky is 

 diversified by an unwonted spectacle. The path of the 

 meteor leaves a stain of pearly light on the sky to mark 

 the highway pursued by our celestial visitor. 



In its fearful career the meteor is often rent to frag- 

 ments, reduced to dust, dissolved into vapour. The glow- 

 ing atoms of the wreck lie strewn along the path, just 

 as the ghastly remnants of Napoleon's mighty army 

 limned out the awful retreat from Moscow. 



A pencil-shaped cloud of meteoric debris, perhaps eighty 

 or a hundred miles in length, and four or five miles in 

 diameter, thus hangs po ; sed in air. It is at night. The 

 un has sunk so far below the horizon that there is no 



