ron, 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:--

"Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there who knoweth not how
that the city of the Ephesians is temple-keeper of the great
Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter?"

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 _debris_ 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 terme