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Updated: June 4, 2025
If the night had been darker, the spectacle would have been finer; but even as it was, the moon seemed quite paled for a few minutes afterwards. We have seen many meteors, falling-stars, and shooting-stars since we left Valparaiso, but none so fine as the one this evening. Friday, December 1st.
We should stretch the probabilities were we to assert that Anaxagoras knew that shooting-stars and meteors were the same, yet there is an interesting suggestiveness in his likening the shooting-stars to sparks leaping from the firmament, taken in connection with his observation on meteorites.
Like other astronomers of his time he was greatly puzzled over the well-known phenomena of shooting-stars, or meteors, making many observations himself, and examining carefully the observations of other astronomers. In 1714 he gave his views as to the origin and composition of these mysterious visitors in the earth's atmosphere.
The full significance of this observation was at once recognized by astronomers; it demonstrated beyond all cavil the cosmical origin of the shooting-stars. Some conservative meteorologists kept up the argument for the telluric origin for some decades to come, as a matter of course such a band trails always in the rear of progress.
Yet, since a few detonating meteors have been found to proceed from ascertained radiants of shooting-stars, it is difficult to suppose that any generic difference separates them. Their assimilation is further urged though not with any demonstrative force by two instances, the only two on record, of the tangible descent of an aerolite during the progress of a star-shower.
Night now closed in more completely, and many lights began to flit through the wood, just as those fiery exhalations from the earth, that look like shooting-stars to our eyes, flit through the heavens; a frightful noise, too, was heard, like that made by the solid wheels the ox-carts usually have, by the harsh, ceaseless creaking of which, they say, the bears and wolves are put to flight, if there happen to be any where they are passing.
Amid rockets, bombs, and shooting-stars, two pretty young women walked up and down on the tight rope, like magical apparitions, amid the encircling flames. After the fireworks a ballet was performed by the dancers from the Opera, under the direction of Gardel; it represented the different nations of Europe in their national dress. After the ballet came the ball, which was most animated.
From Seventeen Hundred Forty for the next thirty-five years the intellectual sky seemed full of shooting-stars.
It is not, indeed, universally admitted that the ponderous masses of which, according to Daubrée's estimate, at least 600 fall annually from space upon the earth, ever formed part of the bodies known to us as comets. Some follow Tschermak in attributing to aerolites a totally different origin from that of periodical shooting-stars.
When darkness had fallen, they kindled the bonfire, and then, as it blazed up, they lighted the discs at it, and, after swinging them to and fro at the end of a stout and supple hazel-wand, they hurled them one after the other, whizzing and flaming, into the air, where they described great arcs of fire, to fall at length, like shooting-stars, at the foot of the mountain.
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