The connection between shooting stars and bad weather, mentioned by many ancient writers, will appear probable if we consider certain facts established in the domain of modern science. Of all the various theories advanced to explain this startling phenomenon (termed meteor, fire-ball, shooting-star, moon-stone, sun-stone), that seems to be the most probable which considers them planetary bodies of very small size, circulating in an orbit round the sun, as our earth, and getting into that of the latter, entangled by her attraction, which occasionally brings down some of them upon her surface. Numerous planetary bodies, called Ceres, Pallas, &c., exist between Mars and Jupiter, and similar bodies of smaller dimensions may exist between the earth and its neighbors in the solar system.
Periodicy is a great fact in cosmical arrangements, and this phenomenon of shooting stars, &c., is strikingly periodical. Induced, apparently, by certain popular weather maxims among the French, M. C. St. Claire Deville has investigated the subject, and his conclusions are positive as to the “perturbations of the earth’s temperature,” coincident with the phenomenon as noticed from time immemorial in about the first fortnight of February, May, August, and November. M. Deville even ventures upon general conclusions from the fact. He says: “Do not all these considerations almost necessarily lead us to infer the influence of these critical periods, by their sudden variations of temperature, not only on the health of the vegetable creation, but that of the human race? Should we not examine the registers of hospitals, to see if certain diseases are not more frequent on certain days of certain years? Can we not even go back to the past and see, in the history and chronicles of past ages, if there are some traces of periodicy in certain great perturbations in the health of nations like the two invasions of cholera, which perhaps by chance occurred in 1832 and in 1849, about the center of the two critical periods, and which came from the north like the aurora borealis, since it seems, also, that it is these great atmospheric waves that propagate the perturbations of temperature?” In confirmation of this view we may notice the cattle plague, and the cholera still hovering over us and likely to recommence its ravages.
Professor Erman, of Berlin, writing to Arago, in 1840, said that “the two swarms or currents of asteroids (planetary bodies) which the earth meets on the ecliptic, respectively, about the 10th of August and the 13th of November, annually intervene between the earth and the sun, the first in the days between the 5th and 11th of February, the second from the 10th to 15th of May. Each of these conjunctions annually causes at those dates a very remarkable extinction of the heating ray of the sun, and thereby lowers the temperature at all points of the surface of the globe.”
With respect to the November display of the phenomenon, it appears that its maximum was in 1799 and in 1833. Since then it has almost entirely ceased, but according to the prediction of Olbers it will resume the ascendant in 1867. Humboldt and others have reported on these displays, but that of the night of the 12th and 13th of November, 1833, in the United States, as described by Olmstead, needs only to be mentioned for our present purpose. No less than 300,000 masses, forming parts of the solar system, passed through that part of our terrestrial atmosphere which was visible at Boston, Mass.
“It was supposed that they were only stopped in the atmosphere and prevented from reaching the earth by transferring their motion to columns of air, large volumes of which they would suddenly and violently displace.
“It was remarked that the state of the weather and the condition of the seasons following this meteoric shower were just such as might have been anticipated from these disturbing circumstances of the atmospheric equilibrium.”
M. C. Gravier believes that meteors show the direction of the coming wind; that their slow motion foretells a calm to ensue, or to continue if it exists; in fact, he says they are our weather-cocks and anemometers in the upper regions of the sky. He predicts that the rest of the present year (1866) will be more dry than wet, and the temperature above the average.
Our object in this article is merely to draw attention to the critical periods. It is obvious that if the passage of these meteors take place by day we cannot see them, so that their non-appearance is no reason why we should not be on our guard. From a list of storms obligingly given us by the meteorologic office as having in past years occurred at or about some of the periods we have named, and from our own investigations, we believe that the subject is worthy of attention, suggestive of caution at those critical periods, and altogether deserving a more lengthy consideration than we can give it in our limited space on this occasion.
During the great Barbadoes hurricane, August 10, 1831, fiery meteors fell perpendicularly from a vast height. The correspondence of the date, August 10th, is striking, and all are familiar with the great “November Atmospheric Wave,” and its storms, especially the great Crimean hurricane of disastrous memory (November 14, 1855). (Manual of Weathercasts, by Andrew Steinmetz.)
The following interesting report relative to weather prognostics of the Zuñi Indians was furnished by Mr. G. H. Cushing, assistant ethnologist of the Smithsonian Institution: