SCIENCE.-SUPPLEMENT. 



FRIDAY. AUGUST 20, 1886. 



METEORITES, METEORS, AND SHOOTING- 

 STARS. 



You are kindly giving to me an hour to-night 

 in which I may speak to you. I do not have 

 enough coiilidence in myself to justify me in speak- 

 ing to such an audience as this upon one of those 

 hroad subjects that belong equally to all sections 

 of the association. The progress, the encourage- 

 ments, and the difficulties in each field are best 

 known to the workers in the field, and I should 

 do you httle good by trying to sum up and recount 

 them. Let me rather err, then, if at all, by going 

 to the opposite extreme. 



Two years ago your distinguished president in- 

 structed and delighted us all by speaking of the 

 pending problems of astronomy, what they are, 

 and" what hopes we have of solving them. To one 

 subject in this one science, a subject so subordinate 

 that he very properly gave it only brief notice, I 

 ask your attention I propose to state some prop- 

 ositions which we may believe to be probably true 

 about the meteorites, the meteors, and the shoot- 

 ing-stars. 



In trying to interest you in this subject, so re- 

 mote from the studies of most of you, I rely upon 

 your sense of the unity of all science, and at the 

 same time upon the strong hold which these weird 

 bodies have ever had upon the imaginations of 

 men. In ancient times temples were built over 

 the meteorite images that fell down from Jupiter, 

 and divine worship was paid them ; and in these 

 later days a meteorite stone that fell last year in 

 India became the object of daily anointings and 

 other ceremonial worship. In the fearful imagery 

 of the Apocalypse, the terrors are deepened by 

 there falling ' from heaven a great star burning as 

 a torch ,' and by the stars of heaven falling " unto 

 the earth as a fig tree casteth her unripe figs when 

 she is shaken of a great wind." The "great red 

 dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and 

 upon his heads seven diadems," is presented in the 

 form of a huge flre-baU. " His tail draweth the 

 third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast 

 them to the earth." Records of these feared visit- 

 Address to the American association for the advance- 

 ment of science at Buffalo, Aug. 18, 1S86, by Prof. H. A. 

 NewtoD, of New Haven, the retiring president of the asso- 

 ciation. 



ors, under the name of flying dragons, are found 

 all through the pages of the monkish chroniclers 

 of the middle ages. The Chinese appointed offi- 

 cers to record the passage of meteors and comets, 

 for they were thought to have somewhat to say to 

 the weal or woe of rulers and people. 



By gaining in these later days a sure place in 

 science, these bodies have lost their teiTors ; but 

 so much of oui' knowledge about them is frag- 

 mentary, and there is still so much that is mys- 

 terious, that men have loved to speculate about their 

 origin, their functions, and their relations to other 

 bodies in the solar system. It has been easy, and 

 quite common too, to make these bodies the cause 

 of aU kinds of things for which other causes could 

 not be found. 



They came from the moon ; they came from 

 the earth's volcanoes ; they came from the sun ^ 

 they came from Jupiter and the other planets; 

 they came from some destroyed planet ; they came 

 from comets ; they came from the nebulous mass 

 from which the solar system has grown ; they 

 came from the fixed stars ; they came from the 

 depths of space. 



They supply the sun with his radiant energy ; 

 they give the moon her accelerated motion ; they 

 break in pieces heavenly bodies ; they threw up the 

 mountains on the moon ; they made large gifts to 

 our geological strata ; they cause the auroras ; 

 they give regular and irregular changes to oui 

 weather. 



A comparative geology has been built up from 

 the relations of the earth's rocks to the meteorites ; 

 a large list of new animal forms have been named 

 from their concretions ; and the possible origin of 

 life in our planet has been credited to them. 



They are satellites of the earth ; they travel in 

 streams, and in groups, and in isolated orbits 

 about the sun ; they travel in groups and singly 

 through stellar spaces ; it is they that reflect the 

 zodiacal light ; they constitute the tails of comets ; 

 the solar corona is due to them ; the long coronal 

 rays are meteor streams seen edgewise. 



Nearly all of these ideas have been urged by 

 men deservedly of the highest repute for good per- 

 sonal work in adding to human knowledge. In 

 presence pf this host of speculations it will not, I 

 hope, be a useless waste of your lime to inquire 

 what we may reasonably beheve to be probably 

 true. And if I shall have no new hypotheses to 

 give you, I offer as my excuse that nearly all pos- 

 sible ones have been ah-eady put forth. This as- 



