Great meteorites—"aerolites" as they are called—are like great comets, chance visitors to our world. Now and then they come, but we cannot foretell their coming. Such an aerolite exploded some fifteen miles above Madrid at about 9^h 29^m, on the morning of February 10, 1896:—

Many fragments were picked up, and analyzed, and, like other aerolites, were found to consist of materials already known on the earth. The outer crust showed the signs of fire,—the meteoric stone had been fused and ignited by its very rapid rush through the air—but the interior was entirely unaffected by the heat. The manner in which the elements were combined is somewhat peculiar to aerolites; the nearest terrestrial affinity of the minerals aggregated in them, is to be found in the volcanic products from great depths. Thus aerolites seem to be broken-up fragments from the interior parts of globes like our own. They do not come from our own volcanoes, for the velocities with which they entered our atmosphere prove their cosmical origin. Had our atmosphere not entangled them, many, circuiting the sun in a parabolic or hyperbolic curve, would have escaped for ever from our system. The swift motions, which they had on entering our atmosphere, are considerably greater on the average than those of comets, and probably their true home is not in our solar system, but in interstellar space.

The aerolites that reach the surface are not always exploded into very small fragments, but every now and then quite large masses remain intact. Most of these are stony; some have bits of iron scattered through them; others are almost pure iron, or with a little nickel alloy, or have pockets in them laden with stone. There are hundreds of accounts of the falls of aerolites during the past 2,500 years. The Greeks and Romans considered them as celestial omens, and kept some of them in temples. One at Mecca is revered by the faithful Mohammedans, and Jehangir, the great Mogul, is said to have had a sword forged from an iron aerolite which fell in 1620 in the Panjab. Diana of Ephesus stood on a shapeless block which, tradition says, was a meteoric stone, and reference may perhaps be found to this in the speech of the town-clerk of the city to appease the riot stirred up against St. Paul by Demetrius the silversmith and his companions:—

Aerolites come singly and unexpectedly, falling actually to earth on land or sea. "Shooting stars" come usually in battalions. They travel together in swarms, and the earth may meet the same swarm again and again. They are smaller than aerolites, probably mere particles of dust, and for the most part are entirely consumed in our upper atmosphere, so that they do not actually reach the earth. The swarms travel along paths that resemble cometary orbits; they are very elongated ellipses, inclined at all angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Indeed, several of the orbits are actually those of known comets, and it is generally held that these meteorites or "shooting stars" are the dÉbris that a comet sheds on its journey.

We can never see the same "shooting star" twice; its visibility implies its dissolution, for it is only as it is entrapped and burnt up in our atmosphere that we see it, or can see it. Its companions in a great meteoric swarm, are, however, as the sand on the sea-shore, and we recognize them as members of the same swarm by their agreement in direction and date. The swarms move in a closed orbit, and it is where this orbit intersects that of the earth that we get a great "star shower," if both earth and swarm are present together at the intersection. If the swarm is drawn out, so that many meteorites are scattered throughout the whole circuit of its orbit, then we get a "shower" every year. If the meteor swarm is more condensed, so as to form a cluster, then the "shower" only comes when the "gem of the ring," as it is termed, is at the intersection of the orbits, and the earth is there too. Such a conjunction may present the most impressive spectacle that the heavens can afford. The Leonid meteor shower is, perhaps, the most famous. It has been seen at intervals of about thirty-three years, since early in the tenth century. When Ibrahim ben Ahmed lay dying, in the year 902 a.d., it was recorded that "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." When the earth encountered the same system in 1202 a.d. the Mohammedan record runs that "on the night of Saturday, on the last day of Muharram, stars shot hither and thither in the heavens, eastward and westward, and flew against one another, like a scattering swarm of locusts, to the right and left." There are not records of all the returns of this meteoric swarm between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth, but when the earth encountered it in 1799, Humboldt reported that "from the beginning of the phenomenon there was not a space in the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon that was not filled every instant with bolides and falling stars;" and Mr. Andrew Ellicott, an agent of the United States, cruising off the coast of Florida, watched this same meteoric display, and made the drawing reproduced on the opposite page. In 1833 a planter in South Carolina wrote of a return of this same system, "Never did rain fall much thicker than the meteors fell towards the earth; east, west, north, south, it was the same." In 1866 the shower was again heavy and brilliant, but at the end of the nineteenth century, when the swarm should have returned, the display was meagre and ineffective.

The Leonid system of meteorites did not always move in a closed orbit round our sun. Tracing back their records and history, we find that in a.d. 126 the swarm passed close to Uranus, and probably at that time the planet captured them for the sun. But we cannot doubt that some such similar sight as they have afforded us suggested the imagery employed by the Apostle St. John when he wrote, "The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together."

And the prophet Isaiah used a very similar figure—

Whilst the simile of a great aerolite is that employed by St. John in his description of the star "Wormwood"—

St. Jude's simile of the "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever," may have been drawn from meteors rather than from comets. But, as has been seen, the two classes of objects are closely connected.The word "meteor" is sometimes used for any unusual light seen in the sky. The Zodiacal Light, the pale conical beam seen after sunset in the west in the spring, and before sunrise in the east in the autumn, and known to the Arabs as the "False Dawn," does not appear to be mentioned in Scripture. Some commentators wrongly consider that the expression, "the eyelids of the morning," occurring twice in the Book of Job, is intended to describe it, but the metaphor does not in the least apply.

The Aurora Borealis, on the other hand, seldom though it is seen on an impressive scale in Palestine, seems clearly indicated in one passage. "Out of the north cometh golden splendour" would well fit the gleaming of the "Northern Lights," seen, as they often are, "as sheaves of golden rays."