Could an ordinary shooting star tell us its actual history, the narrative would run somewhat as follows:
“I was a small bit of material, chiefly, if not entirely, composed of substances which are formed from the same chemical elements as those you find on the earth. Not improbably I may have had some iron in my constitution, and also sodium and carbon, to mention only a few of the most familiar elements. I only weighed an ounce or two, perhaps more, perhaps less—but you could probably have held me in your closed hand, or put me into your waistcoat pocket. You would have described me as a sort of small stone, yet I think you would have added that I was very unlike the ordinary stones with which you were familiar. I have led a life of the most extraordinary activity; I have never known what it was to stay still; I have been ever on the move. Through the solitudes of space I have dashed along with a speed which you can hardly conceive. Compare my ordinary motion with your most rapid railway trains; my journey will be done ere the best locomotive ever built could have drawn the train out of the station. Pit me against your rifle bullets, against the shots from your one-hundred-ton guns; before the missile from the mightiest piece of ordnance ever fired shall have gone ten yards I have gone 1,000 yards. I do not assert that my speed has been invariable—sometimes it has been faster, sometimes it has been slower; but I have generally done my million miles a day at the very least. Such has been my career, not for hours or days, but for years and for centuries, probably for untold ages. And the grand catastrophe in which I vanished has been befitting to a life of such transcendent excitement and activity; I have perished instantly, and in a streak of splendor. In the course of my immemorial wanderings I have occasionally passed near some of the great bodies in the heavens; I have also not improbably in former years hurried by that globe on which you live. On those occasions you never saw me, you never could have seen me, not even if you had used the mightiest telescope that has ever been directed to the heavens. But too close an approach to your globe was at last the occasion of my fall. You must remember that you live on the earth buried beneath a great ocean of air. Viewed from outside space, your earth is seen to be a great ball, everywhere swathed with this thick coating of air. Beyond the appreciable limits of the air stretches the open space, and there it is that my prodigious journeys have been performed. Out there we have a freedom to move of which you who live in a dense atmosphere have no conception. Whenever you attempt to produce rapid motion on the earth, the resistance of your air largely detracts from the velocity that would be otherwise attainable. Your quick trains are impeded by air, your artillery ranges are shortened by it. Movements like mine would be impossible in air like yours.
“And this air it is which has ultimately compassed my destruction. So long as I merely passed near your earth, but kept clear of that deadly net which you have spread, in the shape of your atmosphere, to entrap the shooting stars, all went well with me. I felt the ponderous mass of the earth, and I swerved a little in compliance with its attraction; but my supreme velocity preserved me, and I hurried past unscathed. I had many narrow escapes from capture during the lapse of those countless ages in which I have been wandering through space. But at last I approached once too often to the earth. On this fatal occasion my course led me to graze your globe so closely that I could not get by without traversing the higher parts of the atmosphere. Accordingly, a frightful catastrophe immediately occurred. Not to you; it did you no harm; indeed, quite the contrary. My dissolution gave you a pleasing and instructive exhibition. It was then, for the first time, that you were permitted to see me, and you called me a shooting star or a meteor.
“When from the freedom of open space I darted into the atmosphere, I rubbed past every particle of air which I touched in my impetuous flight, and in doing so I experienced the usual consequence of friction—I was warmed by the operation.
“You can readily comprehend the immense quantity of heat that will have been produced ere friction could deprive me of a speed of twenty miles a second. That heat not merely warmed me, but I rapidly became red-hot, white-hot, then I melted, even though composed of materials of a most refractory kind. Still friction had much more to do, and it actually drove me off into vapor, and I vanished. You, standing on your earth many miles below, never saw me—never could have seen me—until this supreme moment, when, glowing with an instantaneous fervor, I for a brief second became visible.
“Nature knows no annihilation, and though I had been driven off into vapor and the trial by fire had scattered and dispersed me, yet in the lofty heights of the atmosphere those vapors cooled and condensed. They did not, they never could again reunite and reproduce my pristine structure. Here and there in wide diffusion I repassed from the vaporous to the solid form, and in this state I wore the appearance of a streak of minute granules distributed all along the highway I had followed. These granules gradually subsided through the air to the earth. On Alpine snows, far removed from the haunts of men and from contamination of chimneys, minute particles have been gathered, many of which have unquestionably been derived from the scattered remains of shooting stars. Into the sea similar particles are forever falling, and they have been subsequently dredged up from profound depths, having subsided through an ocean of water after sinking through an ocean of air.”
Those splendid shooting stars which are often called fire-balls move in every direction. They come from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south. There is no hour of the night at which they have not occasionally been seen. Even in daylight it has happened not once or twice, but on several occasions, that a brilliant meteor has forced itself upon our astonished notice. They generally first make their appearance at a height which is between fifty and one hundred miles above the ground. They hurry down their inclined path, but generally become extinguished while still at least twenty miles aloft. In their more ambitious flights meteors have been known to span a kingdom. Nor are even greater strides unrecorded. The length of a continent may be compared with the track of that terrific meteor of 5th September, 1868, which broke into visibility at an appalling height above the Black Sea, and had not expended its stupendous energy until it passed over the smiling vineyards of France.
Great fire-balls are much more numerous than any one would suppose who had not paid attention to the subject. Nor need this be a matter for surprise if it be remembered that when a fire-ball does arrive it is only by a favorable combination of circumstances that any particular individual is privileged to witness the exhibition. As a random example of the yearly crop of fire-balls, I take from the middle of 1877 to the middle of 1878. A list of the fire-balls noticed during this period will be found in that store-house of valuable information, the Reports of the British Association. In the year referred to I see that eighty-six great fire-balls have been recorded. They have appeared in various localities, both in the old hemisphere and in the new. The most arduous observer may think himself fortunate if he has even seen one of them.
As to the brilliant light from some of these great fire-balls, there are numerous statements. We are not infrequently told that even the beams of the full moon are ineffectual in comparison with the blaze of the meteor; and we find a high authority asserting that one of these bodies displayed a flash as “blinding as the sun.” On the 29th July, 1878, a fire-ball was seen which created so splendid an illumination that “the smallest objects were visible at Manchester.”
Fortunate, indeed, would the astronomer have been who, guided by some miraculous prescience, had gone to the ancient city of York on the evening of the 23d of February, 1879, and on the tower of the glorious minster spent the night in observation of the heavens. It would have been his privilege to witness a majestic meteor under circumstances of almost unique magnificence.