68 Proceedings of. the Boy at Physical Society, 



Colonel Hunter informs me this was believed to have oc- 

 curred at Plean, to the south of Stirling, on the same day 

 and hour, 4'55 p.m., as the one seen by himself, giving as his 

 authority the " Stirling Journal." It is probable that it was 

 the same meteor which was seen at both these places, the 

 direction of its course being, as already stated, from south- 

 west to north-east, the very line which would connect them 

 together. 



Other meteors were observed at various places in the be- 

 ginning of the month of February, and have been noticed 

 in the different newspapers. These notices all refer, of 

 course, to luminous appearances, greatly larger and more 

 brilliant than the usual and well-known " shooting stars/' 

 as they have been designated. At a time when illuminations 

 and fireworks were so much talked about and experimented 

 upon, preparatory to their full blaze on the 10th of March, 

 on the auspicious occasion of the marriage of the Prince of 

 Wales, some caution, of course, was necessary in setting 

 down every unusual luminous appearance seen at night to 

 the agency of meteors ; still there seems no reason to believe 

 that any of the cases now referred to were due to such a 

 cause. I shall, however, notice them only very briefly. 



Colonel Hunter also states, that on Saturday the 7th 

 February, the Kev< Mr Morris, at Muthill, eight miles to the 

 north-west of Auchterarder, saw a distant meteor rise in a 

 long parabolic curve, and apparently fall towards the ground ; 

 and in a letter which I have since received from the Kev. 

 Albert J. T. Morris, Muthill, he favours me with the follow- 

 ing interesting details : — 



" As to the meteor which I saw on the evening of the 7th of "Feb- 

 ruary, it was about 7.15 p.m , and was visible for about seventeen or 

 eighteen seconds, quite long enough to be very carefully observed. The 

 horizon was especially free from cloud or vapour. The meteor rose 

 from the horizon (in the S.S.W.) perpendicularly for about 28 degrees, 

 it then curved regularly and fell perpendicularly, disappearing "at the 

 horizon, a little to the westward of due south, so that its whole parabola, 

 if completed, would have been very much elongated as compared with 

 its shorter diameter. 



" From the accounts I afterwards saw in the newspapers, showing 

 that it had been visible at so many various and distant points, I calcu- 

 lated (at the time) that it must have been 300 miles to the south of the 



