stony substance ; which, in floating about in
vast space, happen to graze or fly through
the earth's thin atmosphere, and become
shining hot by reason of the resistance it
offers to their violent motion. This effect is
nothing extraordinary, as it is well known
that tinder may be ignited in a small tube,
the air in which is suddenly compressed by
means of a plunger ; indeed, so much heat
may be raised in this way, that, if a thirty-
two pound shot could be driven through the
air at the rate of ten miles per second —or
one-third only of the travelling rate of most
shooting stars —it would quickly attain a
temperature of one million degrees, or three
hundred times the heat of boiling iron.
There can be no difficulty, then, in believing
that the body of a shooting star must
become intensely heated simply by its friction
with the atmosphere when rushing through
at the rate of fifty-four thousand miles an
hour.

The air itself is luminous when sufficiently
compressed, and this fact may account for the
faintly visible wake left by those meteors
which penetrate into its lower and denser
layers. A very remarkable star of this
latter class appeared over the Shetland
Isles not many years ago, with a splendour
greater than that of the full moon, and
pursued its rapid way in full view as far
as the overhead of Rome, when it split
into three parts, each followed by a tail. It
was reckoned to pass fifty miles above the
ground, and to fly some thirty miles in a
second of time.

Lastly, if the course of these shooting stars
happens to be more or less direct towards the
surface of the earth, they cannot escape being
drawn to it by the great law which keeps
up the harmonious movements of the world;
and, when they thus visit us, tbey reveal to
us their substance. Although this is always
solid, few accidents of a serious nature
have attended the descent of aërolites: in
nearly three hundred recorded instances,
only four persons are known to have been
killed. A few years ago one was observed
to burst nearly over the town of
Haupthraustadt, in Bohemia, and one portion
dashed through the roof of a house in
which two little children were asleep,
within a few feet of their bed, but did no
worse than frighten them. When dug out,
the stone proved to be as large as an
ordinary cannon-shot.

There is now no doubt of these
meteorites being shooting stars; but the
question has not been settled, What are
shooting stars? On the contrary, the more
we inquire, the more the marvel increases;
the tale becomes intricate, and we are
fairly launched into a world of inquiry
boundless and trackless. What shall we
say to those flying masses of matter which
we call shooting stars? Science tells us
unerringly, if they are independent of the
earth they must be little planets themselves,
performing a regular progress round the sun
as we do, and invisible to us except when
they venture near our atmosphere. Now, it
is known that, although we are seeing shooting
stars at all times of the year, yet there
are periods— on the tenth of August and the
thirteenth of November —when they are
abundant ; and, at the former date especially,
regular in their appearance. Watchers at
Paris and other places on this night have
counted, during one hour, as many as one
hundred and eighty-four such appearances ;
so many were seen in America on the
fourteenth of November, eighteen hundred and
thirty-three, as to strike many persons with
terror —people ran to their doors affrighted,
crying that the world was on fire. The
display must have been very grand ; the shower
of fire was bright enough to make small
objects visible, and some of the meteors
assumed the brilliancy of fire-balls. Professor
Plinsted says that this shower was witnessed
from the North American lakes to the West
Indies, and from Central Mexico to the
Bermudas, and that its height above the
earth was two thousand two hundred and
thirty-eight miles.  In India, likewise, a
similarly gorgeous display was witnessed four
years ago.

From many such observations, there is a
well-grounded belief among those who have
studied the subject, that, on the tenth of
August and thirteenth of November we pass
through an innumerable crowd or ring of these
strange bodies; all, like our globe, obeying
the same central authority, and travelling
on in a circle about as large as that of our
earth, but crossing it at that part which
corresponds to the above date. Were it not for
those beneficent laws by which all things are
kept in bounds, there seems to be no reason
why, at these times of the year, we should
not be enveloped in such an awful shower of
meteoric stones as to make woe to the
inhabitants of the earth. Guesses worthy of
belief have been offered, that our planet is
nearly at the edge of at least one vast disc of
these meteors; that they increase in
numbers towards the sun or centre of the disc,
and that the reflected light from the collective
myriads, like motes in the sunbeam, causes
the curious light sometimes seen immediately
before or after sunset at spring-tide, stretching
up from the direction of the sun high into the
heavens in the shape of a cone or sugar-loaf.
If such ideas are true, we must feel thankful
that we are not dwellers in Venus and
Mercury, which must of course be in the very
thick of the trouble.

Will the reader ask us still —what are
shooting stars ? We cannot tell; we see they
are made up of substances found at our feet;
but, as to how it comes to pass that innumerable
hordes of shapeless stony masses—small
and great —hurry pell-mell round the sun,
engrossing a region nearly four hundred of