88 II. A. JSTewton — The Story of BielcCs Comet. 



great — fifty or a hundred times that of a cannon ball — that even 

 in our rare upper atmosphere an intense light and heat was 

 developed by the resistance, and the body was scattered in 

 powder or smoke. These bodies before they come into the air, 

 I call meteoroids. It is only when they have reached our 

 atmosphere and begin to burn that we ever see them. They 

 are then within 90 miles of the ground. 



Brandes, one of the two German students spoken of, was 

 riding in an open post-wagon on the night of Dec. 6, 1798, and 

 saw and counted hundreds of these shooting stars or meteors. 

 At times they came as fast as six or seven a minute. These 

 meteors which Brandes saw that night we know now were bits 

 from Biela's comet. In November, 1833, occurred the famous 

 star shower, which some of you saw. The facts of that shower 

 gave to two New Haven men, Professor Twining and Professor 

 Olmsted, the clue to the true theory of the shooting stars. 

 From that date shooting stars have belonged to astronomy. 

 The November meteors were admitted a new constituent of the 

 solar system. Three years later, M. Quetelet, of Brussels, 

 found that shooting stars are to be seen in unusual numbers 

 about the 10th of August of each year. A few months after- 

 wards Mr. Herrick made independently the same discovery; 

 but he also told us of star showers in April and January. 

 What Brandes had seen in December, 1798, led Mr. Herrick, 

 moreover, to expect a like shower in other Decembers, and he 

 asked that shooting stars be looked for on the 6th and 7th of 

 December, 1838. This shrewd guess was justified, for on the 

 evenings of those days hundreds of these meteors were seen 

 in America, in Europe, and in Asia by persons thus induced 

 to look for them. These shooting stars also had once been 

 parts of Biela's comet, though this (act was not dreamed of at 

 that time. 



In the course of time we came to know more about the 

 meteoroids ; that in general they moved in long orbits like 

 comets, rather than round ones like planets ; that some of them 

 were grouped in long, thin streams, many hundreds of millions 

 of miles long, and that it was by the earth's plunging through 

 these that we have star showers; that the space traveled over 

 by the earth has in it everywhere some of these small bodies, 

 probably the outlying members of hundreds of meteoroid 

 streams. 



Also the periodic time and the path of the stream of No- 

 vember meteoroids were found out. Then came the interesting 

 discover}^ that in this stream, and in that of the August me- 

 teoroids, lay the paths of two comets. Then Dr. Weiss of 

 Vienna showed that the meteors seen by Brandes in 1798, and 

 by Herrick in 1838, as well as many meteors seen near Decern- 



