26 Shooting Stars. 



who has observed these luminous meteors, will scarcely be 

 of the opinion, that the point upon which they appear to 

 fall, in the darkness of the night could be easily found with 

 such certainty, that he could exactly discover the supposed 

 substance, and 1 might say, could be certain that he had in 

 his hand a shooting star, which had fallen from heaven. Be- 

 fore this unsettled point is ascertained, it is to be doubted, 

 whether we can pass any judgment upon the nature of the 

 shooting star. Indeed, the observation of the before men- 

 tioned North American meteor, appears to be not without 

 some doubt, as to its accuracy ; and it might be still a sub- 

 ject of inquiry, whether the product of a fiery meteor could 

 be a gelatinous mass? 



Our knowledge of shooting stars is very much extended by 

 the valuable researches of Professor Brandes of Breslau ; 

 but what concerns the nature of their substance, appears to 

 me to be, as yet, dark and undiscovered ; at least according 

 to my views, the gelatinous masses which are found in mead- 

 ows, should by no means be considered as the product of 

 shooting stars. 



It now remains for me to consider the differences which 

 apparently exist between the results of the observations of 

 Messrs. Buchner and Schwabe, and my own statement. The 

 care with which they have drawn up both their descriptions, 

 allows us to compare them with sufficient exactness. 



Both the substances examined by these gentlemen, as I 

 have already suggested, exhibit different properties, which 

 are sufficiently essential to make us look for a different ori- 

 gin for each, so that I cannot coincide with the views of 

 Schwabe, when he considers the mass examined by Buchner 

 as analogous to his own, and confidently comes to the de- 

 cision, that the substance examined by Buchner was a tre- 

 mclla. As respects Buchner's mass, it accords exactly with 

 the specimens which I examined. The chemical composi- 

 tion of both is precisely the same, and the only particular 

 difference, which appears to present itself, consists in this 

 circumstance, that the mass examined by Buchner apparent- 

 ly exhibited no organic structure, while that observed by me, 

 as I have before declared, presented all the signs of an ani- 

 mal product. But if we consider the appearance of the 

 snail spawn jelly, which I have already described, especially 

 in the places where the pellicle was broken, through which 

 the jelly protruded, and all appearance of organic structure 



