Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1883-12-25
NOVEMBER MErRoRs.

gazing occasionally at the beauties of
the starry heavens, must have sometimes
seen star rush across the sky and sud
denly disappear, leaving perhaps
bright track of light behind it, which,
however, soon faded out of sight. There
are few nights in the year when the at
tentive watcher will not be rewarded by
seeing at least one or two of these
shooting stars" or meteors," but
there are certain seasons when they are
always to be seen, sometimes in very
considerable numbers. Thus, on the
nights of August 9, 10, and II, the as
tronomer as confidently expects to see a
plenteous shower of meteors, If the
weather be but clear, as to see the moon
rise at the time predicted by the alma
nae. So that even these strange bodies
which appear so suddenly, shoot across
the sky so rapidly and disappear so ut
terlv. have their times and their seasons,
and are governed by fixed and unyield-
ing laws.
But these showers, which occur at
fixed dates year by year, are not by any
means the most remarkable displays of
shooting-stars which are afforded to us.
Not few of our readers will remember
the marvellous night of November IL,
1866, when for several hours the whole
heavens burned with an unceasing rain
of brilliant meteors, many far brighter
than Venus ever is, and leaving behind
them trains of richly colored light.
The meteors were most frequent be-
tween one o'clock in the morning and
quarter past, during which interval one
hundred and twenty meteOrs fell in ev-
cry minute. In all nearly nine thou
sand were counted by the observers at
Greenwich, and it was supposed that at
| least one thousand more had escaped
enumeration.
This marvellous and beautiful exhi-
bition was not the first or most magniti-
cent of its kind Thirty-three years be-
fore, on the very same night of the
year, the dwellers in North America had
been startled by spectacle which for
grandeur and awfulness had never been
approached in the memory of man, and
there are Indian tribes who reckon their
| time from "the night when the stars
fell" A South Carolina planter thus
describes the terror which the phenom-
enon produced upon the slaves on his
estate.
81 was suddenly awakened by the
most distressing cries that ever fell on
my ears. Shrieks of horror and cries
for mercy could hear from most of the
negroes of the three plantations,
amounting in all to about six or eight
hundred. While earnestly listening for
the cause, | heard faint voice near the
door calling my name. | arose, and,
| taking my sword, stood at my door.
At this moment | heard the same voice
still beseeching me to rise, and saying:
90, my God, the world is on fire. [
| then opened the door, and it is difficult
! to say which excited me the most, the
awfulness of the scene, or the distressed
i cries of the negroes. Upwards of
! hundred lay PROSTATE on the ground,
some speechless, and some, with bitter
cries, but with their hands raised i'm
ploring God to save the world and
them. The scene was truly awful, for
never did rain fall much thicker than
the meteors fell towards the earth
East, West, North, and South, it was
| the same
The great display of November ID,
! 1888, was by no means the first marvel
Gus shower of meteors that had been
witnessed at that time of the year. A
similar but much smaller fall occurred
precisely one year earlier, on November
| 13, 1882; but to find the next earlier
| display, we must go back, not one year,
but thirty-three to November y, 1899,
when the great traveller, Humboldt,
witnessed a wonderful shower. For four
! hours the stars rained down so inces-
sanity that there was never a space in
| the sky three times as wide as the moon
| left free from them. But the earliest
recorded notice of the shower takes us
nearly nine centuries farther back, to the
year 902, when England was still mourn
/ ing the recent death of her great Al
| fred, and when Sicily and Southern
Italy were suffering from the incursiOns
of foe as fierce and cruel as those
Danes whom our great monarch had,
with so much difficulty, repulsed from
our shores. The king of Tunis, Ibra-
him bin Ahmad, had conquered Sicily,
driven out the Christians, and set up
the faith of the False Prophet. Cross
ing over to the mainland of Italy he was
besieging Cosenza when he suddenly
died, and the monks thus freed from so
great a terror, have chronicled-a con-
firmation to them that Heaven had in
deed interpose on their behalf-that
when King Ibrahim died, 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"
In the nine hundred years between
these two dates, 800 and 1899, we have
several other instances of the appear
ances of these showers, and these inter
mediate dates are by no means scat
tered over the interval at random, but
show that the earth in its revolution
round the sun meets the stream of me-
teors about three times in each century.
1t now became a matter of great in
terest to determine the orbit on which
these tiny little planets are travelling.
The data for doing this were not forth
coming until the shower of 1866, but
after that event it was discovered that
they moved in a long, oval orbit, round
which they took thirty three and a
quarter years to travel. The dimen-
sions of the stream were next ascer-
tanned, and the following astonishing
facts have become apparent: The stream
is fifteen hundred millions of miles in
length, four millions in breadth, and one
million in thickness, and though the
meteors are so widely scattered that we
can say with much certainty that an av-
erage interval of at least one hundred
miles separates any two, even where the
stream is densest, yet so enormous is
the space over which the entire swarm
is now scattered, that the total number
must be reckoned by many millions of
millions.
Sometimes a meteor comes into our
atmosphere, which is so large and of so
firm a nature that the heat occasioned
by the speed of its rush through the
air does not suffice to destroy it, and it
therefore reaches the ground, and is