Nature and Art, January 1, 1867.] 
THE METEORIC SHOWER OE NOVEMBER, 1866. 
THE METEORIC SHOWER OF NOVEMBER, 1866 . 
By J. Carpenter, of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. 
W E should do Nature poor j ustice if we were to 
consecrate all our lays and devote all our 
attentions to those of her works and wonders that 
are comprised within the area hounded by the 
surface of the little globe we inhabit, to the 
exclusion of those grander creations and more 
sublime phenomena that are to be witnessed in the 
boundless space above and around us. A fitting 
opportunity for breaking new ground is offered by 
the beautiful and seemingly marvellous display of 
celestial pyroteclmy which attracted so large a 
share of public attention on the night of the 13th ' 
of November last ; and we take advantage of the j 
occasion to mingle in our columns the researches of 
the naturalist with the observations and inductions 
of the philosopher. 
It may be thought that the numerous accounts of 
and comments upon this meteoric shower which ap- 
peared in the daily newspapers at the time have 
exhausted the subject, and that hence there is no 
more to be said concerning it. But a newspaper 
communication is an ephemeral production — read 
one instant and forgotten the next ; and, moreover, 
much as has been said in this form concerning 
meteors, a great deal has been left unsaid ; and we 
have, therefore, no fear of not finding “ ample room 
and verge enough ” for the few remarks it is our 
pleasure now to lay before the reader. 
Our talk is to be of meteors. What, then, is a 
meteor? In popular parlance, it is known as a 
“shooting” or “falling” star, and in very many 
minds an impression prevails that when these 
bodies are seen to dart across the sky, some of the 
fixed stars have really “ shot from their spheres 
we have more than once been asked by innocent 
querists why the stars are called fixed , when every 
now and then they are seen to fall ? It is, there- 
fore, necessary to inform all who have a notion of 
this sort in their minds, that there is no connection 
whatever between shooting stars and the fixed stars 
of the firmament, and that there is nothing whatever 
in common between them. The fixed stars are stu- 
pendous suns like ours, possibly the centres of plane- 
tary systems, billions of miles distant from us; while 
shooting stars are tiuy little bodies, varying from a 
few grains to a few pounds in weight, and, com- 
paratively speaking, only a few miles above the 
earth’s surface. Do you wonder how their height 
is measured? We will endeavour to show you. 
Those who have brought a little trigonometry away 
from school with them will not require to be told 
that the angular altitude of a meteor, observed at 
two distant stations, is all that is required for the 
purpose of determining its height. The principle 
of the means by which this is effected may, how- 
ever, be made intelligible without much geometry. 
Suppose one observer at London and another at 
Brighton simultaneously observe a particular meteor. 
Suppose the observer at London estimates its angular 
altitude at 65 degrees above the horizon, while 
the one at Brighton estimates that altitude at 
55 degrees. Now, if upon a base line, A B, we 
measure off a part, C D, upon any convenient scale 
(say an inch to 10 miles), which shall represent the 
distance between London and Brighton ; and if we 
draw a line, C E, inclined to the base line at an 
angle of 65 degrees, and another line, D E, inclined 
to the base line at an angle of 55 degrees, they will 
meet or intersect at a point, M. Then, if we drop a 
perpendicular from M to the base line, the length 
of this line will represent the height of the meteor, 
upon the same scale as that which we chose for 
our base line. By means analogous to this the 
heights of a large number of meteors have been at 
various times determined, and it has been found, 
within very small limits of error, that the average 
height of meteors at the middle of their flight is 62 
miles ; their height at commencement being about 
10 miles greater and at disappearance about 10 
miles less than this. 
Falling stars, then, have nothing to do with the 
members proper of the starry firmament. This 
fact, by showing what they are not, helps in a 
very small degree to a knowledge of what they are. 
Of course, a lot of theories, more or less fanciful, 
have been proposed to account for them. They have 
been supposed, since they are known to make their 
appearance within our atmosphere, to be the result 
of some sort of gaseous exhalations to which that 
atmosphere gives birth ; they have been held to be of 
electrical nature, something like electric sparks ; 
they have been thought to be darted to the earth 
from the sun ; and for a long time they were held 
to be small fragments of matter ejected from the 
volcanoes of the moon. But each and all of these 
hypotheses involved conditions that the meteors do 
not fulfil ; and hence, one by one, they have been 
abandoned. The generally received theory of the 
present day, and it is one which is satisfied by all 
the phenomena which these bodies present, is that 
they are small masses of cosmical matter circulating 
