“I was suddenly awakened by the most distressing cries that ever fell on my ears. Shrieks of horror and cries for mercy I could hear from most of the negroes of the three plantations, amounting in all to about six hundred or eight hundred. While earnestly listening for the cause I heard a faint voice near the door, calling my name. I arose, and, taking my sword, stood at the door. At this moment I heard the same voice still beseeching me to rise, and saying, ‘O my God, the world is on fire!’ I then opened the door, and it is difficult to say which excited me the most—the awfulness of the scene, or the distressed cries of the negroes. Upwards of one hundred lay prostrate on the ground,—some speechless and some with the bitterest cries, but with their hands raised, imploring God to save the world and them. ‘The scene was truly awful; for never did rain fall much thicker than the meteors fell toward the earth; east, west, north, and south, it was the same.”

The illustration on page 189 does not exaggerate the number of the fiery flashes at such a time, though the zigzag course which is observed in some is hardly so common as it here appears.

When it was noted that the same date, November 13th, had been distinguished by star-showers in 1831 and 1832, and that the great shower observed by Humboldt in 1799 was on this day, the phenomenon was traced back and found to present itself about every thirty-three years, the tendency being to a little delay on each return; so that Professor Newton and others have found it possible with this clew to discover in early Arabic and other mediæval chronicles, and in later writers, descriptions which, fitted together, make a tolerably continuous record of this thirty-three-year shower, beginning with that of King Ibrahim already alluded to. The shower appeared again in November, 1867 and 1868, with less display, but with sufficient brilliance to make the writer well remember the watch through the night, and the count of the flying stars, his most lively recollection being of their occasional colors, which in exceptional cases ranged from full crimson to a vivid green. The count on this night was very great, but the number which enter the earth’s atmosphere even ordinarily is most surprising; for, though any single observer may note only a few in his own horizon, yet, taking the world over, at least ten millions appear every night, and on these special occasions very many more. This November shower comes always from a particular quarter of the sky, that occupied by the constellation Leo, but there are others, such as that of August 10th (which is annual), in which the “stars” seem to be shot at us from the constellation Perseus; and each of the numerous groups of star-showers is now known by the name of the constellation whence it seems to come, so that we have Perseids on August 10th, Geminids on December 12th, Lyrids, April 20th, and so on.

The great November shower, which is coming once more in this century, and which every reader may hope to see toward 1899, is of particular interest to us as the first whose movements were subjected to analysis; for it has been shown by the labors of Professor Newton, of Yale, and Adams, of Cambridge, that these shooting stars are bodies moving around the sun in an orbit which is completed in about thirty-three years. It is quite certain, too, that they are not exhalations from the earth’s atmosphere, but little solids, invisible till they shine out by the light produced by their own fusion. Each, then, moves on its own track, but the general direction of all the tracks concurs; and though some of them may conceivably be solidified gases, we should think of them not as gaseous in form, but as solid shot, of the average size of something like a cherry, or perhaps even of a cherry-stone, yet each an independent planetoid, flying with a hundred times the speed of a rifle-bullet on its separate way as far out as the orbit of Uranus; coming back three times in a century to about the earth’s distance from the sun, and repeating this march forever, unless it happen to strike the atmosphere of the earth itself, when there comes a sudden flash of fire from the contact, and the distinct existence of the little body, which may have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, is ended in a second.

If the reader will admit so rough a simile, we may compare such a flight of these bodies to a thin swarm of swift-flying birds—thin, but yet immensely long, so as to be, in spite of the rapid motion, several years in passing a given point, and whose line of flight is cut across by us on the 13th of November, when the earth passes through it. We are only there on that day, and can only see it then; but the swarm is years in all getting by, and so we may pass into successive portions of it on the anniversary of the same day for years to come. The stars appear to shoot from Leo, only because that constellation is in the line of their flight when we look up to it, just as an interminable train of parallel flying birds would appear to come from some definite point on the horizon.

We can often see the flashes of meteors at over a hundred miles, and though at times they may seem to come thick as Hakes of falling snow, it is probable, according to Professor Newton, that even in a “shower” each tiny planetoid is more than ten miles from its nearest neighbor, while on the average it is reckoned that we may consider that each little body, though possibly no larger than a pea, is over two hundred miles from its neighbor, or that to each such grain there is nearly ten million cubic miles of void space. Their velocity as compounded with that of the earth is enormous, sometimes forty to fifty miles per second (according to a recent but unproved theory of Mr. Denning, it would be much greater), and it is this enormous rate of progress that affords the semblance of an abundant fall of rain, notwithstanding the distance at which one drop follows another. It is only from their light that we are able to form a rough estimate of their average size, which is, as we have seen, extremely small; but, from their great number, the total weight they add to the earth daily may possibly be a hundred tons, probably not very much more. As they are as a rule entirely dissipated in the upper air, often at a height of from fifty to seventy miles, it follows that many tons of the finest pulverized and gaseous matter are shot into the earth’s atmosphere every twenty-four hours from outer space, so that here is an independent and constant supply of dust, which we may expect to find coming down from far above the highest clouds.

Now, when the reader sees the flash of a shooting star, he may, if he please, think of the way the imagination of the East accounts for it, or he may look at what science has given him instead. In the latter case he will know that a light which flashed and faded almost together came from some strange little entity which had been traversing cold and vacant space for untold years, to perish in a moment of more than fiery heat; an enigma whose whole secret is unknown, but of which, during that instant flash, the spectroscope caught a part, and found evidence of the identity of some of its constituents with those of the observer’s own body.

VII.
COMETS.

Of comets, the Old Astronomy knew that they came to the sun from great distances in all directions, and in calculable orbits; but as to what they were, this, even in the childhood of those of us who are middle-aged, was as little known as to the centuries during which they still from their horrid heads shook pestilence and war. We do not know even now by any means exactly what they are, for enough yet remains to be learned about them still to give their whole study the attraction which belongs to the unknown; and yet we learn so much, and in a way which to our grandfathers would have been so unexpected, connecting together the comet, the shooting star, and the meteorite, that the astronomer who perhaps speaks with most authority about these to-day was able, not long ago, in beginning a lecture, to state that he held in his hand what had been a part of a comet; and what he held was, not something half vaporous or gaseous, as we might suppose from our old associations, but a curious stone like this on page 203, which, with others, had fallen from the sky in Iowa, a flashing prodigy, to the terror of barking dogs, shying horses, and fearful men, followed by clouds of smoke and vapor, and explosions that shook the houses like an earthquake, and “hollow bellowings and rattling sounds mingled with clang and clash and roar,” as an auditor described it. It is only a fragment of a larger stone which may have weighed tons. It looks inoffensive enough now, and its appearance affords no hint of the commotion it caused in a peaceable neighborhood only ten years ago. But what, it may be asked, is the connection between such things and comets?