Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/462

446 of these bodies pass daily into the earth's atmosphere, of which about seven millions and a half are large enough to be seen with the naked eye on a clear night, and in the absence of the moon.

From the direction and swiftness of their flight, it is manifest that meteors are visitors from without. They plunge into our atmosphere, and the resistance to which they become then suddenly exposed must raise them to a temperature which exeedsexceeds [sic] that of the most intense furnace. The heat is enough first to melt and then to dissipate in vapor the most refractory substances, and it only now and then happens that even a part of a meteor escapes this fate, and reaches the ground. They are for the most part lost in vapor ere they get within several miles of us. The difficulty, indeed, is not to account for their incandescence, but to see why they do not emit a greater flood of light where the heat must be so intense. And, in fact, they can not be other than very small bodies, or they would be much brighter. The average weight of those visible to the unassisted eye appears to be under an ounce, and the telescopic ones, of course, are much lighter.

Meteors may be distributed into two very obvious classes—casual meteors, which dart irregularly through the sky, and meteoric showers, which stream into our atmosphere in one definite direction, and at stated intervals of time. We are concerned at present with the meteoric showers. Many such are known to exist, of which the principal are the August shower, through which the earth passes every year upon the 9th, 10th, and 11th of August, and the great November shower, which is discharged upon the earth three times in a century. The November meteors are those about which most is known, and it was of these, therefore, that the lecture chiefly treated.

To make their history intelligible, it is necessary to explore, in some degree, the regions from which they come. For this purpose your attention is called to this great diagram, every hundredth of an inch upon which represents a distance in nature equal to the interval between the earth and the moon. The distance from the earth to the sun on this diagram is a decimetre, that is, four inches'; and, on the same scale, the nearest fixed star would have to be placed at a distance of twenty kilometres, or upward of twelve miles.

In these vast celestial spaces, there are no rails over the roughnesses of which the train must be made to rattle, if it is to move at all; there are no wheels to be worn out; there is no air in which a wind must be produced, or through which noise will be propagated. The music of the spheres is not a sound audible to the ear, and an impediment to motion: it is harmless, it is altogether good, it is the pleasure of the human mind when it understands the great works of nature. There is no thundering along through the heavens. All is silence and peace round the planets as they swiftly glide. Bodies which sweep