Such a conjunction may present the most impressive spectacle that the heavens can afford. The Leonid meteor shower is, perhaps, the most famous. It has been seen at intervals of about thirty-three years, since early in the tenth century. When Ibrahim ben Ahmed lay dying, in the year 902 a.d., it was recorded that "an infinite number of stars were seen during the night, scattering themselves like rain to the right and left, and that year was known as the year of stars." When the earth encountered the same system in 1202 a.d. the Mohammedan record runs that "on the night of Saturday, on the last day of Muharram, stars shot hither and thither in the heavens, eastward and westward, and flew against one another, like a scattering swarm of locusts, to the right and left." There are not records of all the returns of this meteoric swarm between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth, but when the earth encountered it in 1799, Humboldt reported that "from the beginning of the phenomenon there was not a space in the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon that was not filled every instant with bolides and falling stars;" and Mr. Andrew Ellicott, an agent of the United States, cruising off the coast of Florida, watched this same meteoric display, and made the drawing reproduced on the opposite page. In 1833 a planter in South Carolina wrote of a return of this same system, "Never did rain fall much thicker than the meteors fell towards the earth; east, west, north, south, it was the same." In 1866 the shower was again heavy and brilliant, but at the end of the nineteenth century, when the swarm should have returned, the display was meagre and ineffective.
METEORIC SHOWER OF 1799, NOVEMBER 12.
Seen off Cape Florida, by Mr. Andrew Ellicott.[ToList]
The Leonid system of meteorites did not always move in a closed orbit round our sun. Tracing back their records and history, we find that in a.d. 126 the swarm passed close to Uranus, and probably at that time the planet captured them for the sun. But we cannot doubt that some such similar sight as they have afforded us suggested the imagery employed by the Apostle St. John when he wrote, "The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together."
And the prophet Isaiah used a very similar figure—
"All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig-tree."
Whilst the simile of a great aerolite is that employed by St. John in his description of the star "Wormwood"—
"The third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters."
St. Jude's simile of the "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever," may have been drawn from meteors rather than from comets. But, as has been seen, the two classes of objects are closely connected.