MADEIRA. 25 
night. The signs and prognostics of the weather become 
more than usually interesting to him who has to travel over 
desert wastes, where he has no expectation of meeting with 
even a hovel to hide him from the storm. Such having been my 
case since the period on which I am now writing, it may readily 
be supposed I was not wholly inattentive to these circum- 
stances ; and I can safely say that, as far as my observations 
go, either a clouded atmosphere or rain has invariably suc- 
ceeded the appearance of fiery meteors, or, as they are some- 
times called, falling stars. Perhaps, indeed, the same effect of 
combining the airs might take place, whether these meteors be 
Considered as mere electric sparks, or heated masses of stone 
formed under circumstances and ejected from situations equally 
unknown. The modern conjecture, that the latter might be 
hurled from lunar volcanoes, seems to be the most plausible, 
as, under favourable positions of the sun and moon, calculators 
have assured us, that the force required to send a stone from 
the latter planet within the attractive sphere of the former 
would be little more than three times that of a cannon ball. 
Thus the various accounts we meet with, in ancient history, 
of stones descending from the heavens, and supposed to have 
been ejected from the sun or the moon, are not quite so fabulous 
as they were long held to be. E^^en modern philosophers dis- 
believed the fact, and ridiculed the hypothesis ; but they 
have at length condescended to concede that the ancients 
might be correct as to the fact, and possibly not wrong in 
their conclusions. Pliny, who in his natural history has 
given us a compilation of every thing he had read, heard, or 
seen, records an instance, among others of a similar kind, 
E 
