The November Shooting Stars. 191 



John Herschel, for example, speaks of meteors as "bodies 

 extraneous to our planet, which only becomes visible when in 

 the act of grazing our atmosphere" The idea, however, is 

 wholly erroneous, as we shall presently see. Another remark- 

 able question which was asked soon after the occurrence of the 

 November shower, served still more clearly to exhibit the 

 indistinctness of the views commonly held; meteors having 

 been seen at Cape Town at the same hour (actual time) as in 

 England, it was asked how the same meteors could be seen in 

 both places, unless they had travelled as satellites round the 

 earth ? An eminent chemist, who has lately published a work 

 on meteors, speaks of the received opinion of the cosmical 

 origin of meteors, as, after all, merely conjectural, and he 

 evidently leans towards the theory that they are satellites of 

 the earth. Lastly, in Guilleinin's " Heavens," a view is 

 expressed (and illustrated by an elaborate figure), which is 

 wholly inconsistent with observed appearances. I refer to the 

 notion that a single stream of bodies could give rise to both 

 the November and August showers. 



It is evident, therefore, that there is room for a careful ex- 

 amination of the actual state of things during the occurrence 

 of the November shower. By considering the position of 

 England on the rotating earth, during the time of the display, 

 we shall be able to form clear views on this point. 



I must first, however, mention briefly the true meaning of 

 the existence of a " radiant point." Once this phenomenon is 

 established, all doubt ivhatever respecting the cosmical origin 

 of a shooting star shower disappears. It is not true that the 

 theory of a cosmical origin is now a conjectural one ; it is 

 established on a thoroughly firm basis. The phenomenon of a 

 radiant point proves in fact this, that the paths in which the 

 meteors intersect our atmosphere, are all parallel in space 

 throughout the time that the shower is visible. Now the 

 display lasting several hours, during which the earth moves 

 through a large angle round her axis of rotation, it is quite 

 clear that the display cannot have a terrestrial origin, since if 

 it had, the direction of the shooting stars might be expected to 

 change correspondingly , and would certainly not change after so 

 artificial a manner that for several places at once the effects of the 

 earth's rotation would be exactly compensated. An equatorial 

 telescope, for instance, is made by clockwork always to point to 

 the same star, but we know that no telescope fixed at random 

 and moved at a random rate would do so. Just, therefore, as 

 a person seeing the same star for a considerable time through 

 the tube of a telescope, knows certainly that he is looking 

 through an equatorial rendered artificially independent of the 

 earth's rotation — so, seeing shooting stars moving always from 



