flights of meteoric masses enormous in size and many in number, which,
falling on the sun's globe with the enormous velocity corresponding to
their vast orbital range and their near approach to the sun--a velocity
of some 360 miles per second--would, beyond all doubt, excite his whole
frame, and especially his surface regions, to a degree of heat far
exceeding what he now emits.

We have had evidence of the tremendous heat to which the sun's surface
would be excited by the downfall of a shower of large meteoric masses.
Carrington and Hodgson, on September 1, 1859, observed (independently)
the passage of two intensely bright bodies across a small part of the
sun's surface--the bodies first increasing in brightness, then
diminishing, then fading away. It is generally believed that these were
meteoric masses raised to fierce heat by frictional resistance. Now so
much brighter did they appear, or rather did that part of the sun's
surface appear through which they had rushed, that Carrington supposed
the dark glass screen used to protect the eye had broken, and Hodgson
described the brightness of this part of the sun as such that the part
shone like a brilliant star on the background of the glowing solar
surface. Mark, also, the consequences of the downfall of those two
bodies only. A magnetic disturbance affected the whole frame of the
earth at the very time when the sun had been thus disturbed. Vivid
auroras were seen not only in both hemispheres, but in latitudes where
auroras are very seldom witnessed. 'By degrees,' says Sir J. Herschel,
'accounts began to pour in of great auroras seen not only in these
latitudes, but at Rome, in the West Indies, in the tropics within
eighteen degrees of the equator (where they hardly ever appear); nay,
what is still more striking, in South America and in Australia--where,
at Melbourne, on the night of September 2, the greatest aurora ever seen
there made its appearance. These auroras were accompanied with unusually
great electro-magnetic disturbances in every part of the world. In many
places the telegraph wires struck work. They had too many private
messages of their own to convey. At Washington and Philadelphia, in
America, the electric signal-men received severe electric shocks. At a
station in Norway the telegraphic apparatus was set fire to; and at
Boston, in North America, a flame of fire followed the pen of Bain's
electric telegraph, which writes down the message upon chemically