WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 303, 22 September 1928, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

Italy’s Supreme Council has had a meeting. Or was it Mr. Mussolini sitting at a table with half a dozen looking-glasses stuck around?

New Zealand finds it almost as hard to pass a Licensing Bill as America finds it to enforce prohibition.

Britain is to spend £779,000 iu housing for its art collections.—Even the utilitarians must admit that this will provide somewhere for the unemployed to go ou wet days.

The killing of two men by the fall of a meteorite in Central India is not, as suggested in the cable news, the first recorded fatality of this kiud. The astronomy books state that a man was killed in 1827 by a falling meteorite, this fatality also occurring in India at a place called Mhow. At N’edagolla in India a man was stunned by the shock of a meteorite whieh landed alongside There are more people to the square mile iu India than in most countries, so the chances of somebody being hit when a meteorite comes down are greater there than in most lands. China, of course, is densely packed with people, but the Chinese news service there does not take much count of an odd citizen being hit by a falling rock: even to-day it takes months before the outside world hears anything when thousands of Chinese have been wiped out in an earthquake, and Hie earth wobbles on much the same whether thev are alive or dead.

In the good old days scientific men were far too wise to be taken in by old wives’ tales of stones falling.from the skies. It was not until some highly respectable people saw a meteorite land at L’Aigle in France in 1803 that it was accepted as established beyond doubt that such things did happen. Now the learned can tell you all about meteorites, where they come from anil what they are, etc., as if they had been under the wing of science from 1 lie year one. A meteor, as everybody knows, is a shooting star, and a meteorite is what sometimes lauds upon earth from a shooting star—in most eases it is burnt to dust on the way down. The astronomers used to tell our great-great-greatgrandfathers that meteors were inflammable gas in tlie sky that had caught alight somehow—and they were just as cocksure about this as the present astronomers are about their trillions and billions and sextillions of light years and parseco. and how much the sun weighs, and what not.

However, meteors were never much, more than an astronomical side show until the night of November 12-13, 1833. On that evening a tempest of shooting stars bombarded the earth,, and continued until the sun got up and blinded people to the free show. North America got the most of it, and people sat up all night watching the display from tb.e Gulf of Mexico in the south to as far north as Halifax. At Boston the falling stars through the night were reckoned to be half as thick as Hie flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. It was impossible to count them, but from what counting was done it was estimated that from any given point at least 240,000 - falling stars must have been visible during the nine hours the show was on.

On any ordinary clear night anyone watching the sky carefully may expect to see from six or seven shooting stars at the least, or perhaps as many as 60 or 70. A lot are not visible to the naked eye, and the astronomers now estimate that altogether several millions enter the earth’s atmosphere every day. On an average they are 80 miles up when first seen, and 50 miles up when they burn out. The bigger ones are seen up as high as 100 miles, and sometimes will only be five or ten miles up when they burn out. Occasionally there is an unburnt core left that hits the ground, and this may consist either of limestone, magnesia, or silicons stone: or sometimes of iron •usually alloyed with nickel and other substances; or sometimes of iron and stone mixed. No new element has been found in any meteorite so far.

In the meteor shower of 1833 it wag noticed that the shooting stars all came from the same part of the sky, and. the astronomers presently discovered that these swarms of meteors were floating about in space, and that one might be expected every 33} years. Past swarms were checked back on the due dates in the ancient chronicles io ■ A.D. 902 and the prediction that another would occur in November, 186(5, was fulfilled with accuracy. Only twice in the meteor showers has the fall of meteorites been recorded. The Saxon chronicle tells how on April 4, 1095, a rock fell in France from the sky on a night of shooting stars, and a man “cast water on it which was raised in steam with a great noise of boiling.” The second time was on November 27, ISSS, when in a meteor shower a “ball of fire” fell to the ground at Mazipil in Mexico in sight of a ranchman.

Whether these meteors are burnt to cinders in the air or fall as meteorites they all add to the earth’s bulk. It is estimated by Professor 11. Spencer Jones (who was spotting the split stars the other day), that about 100 tons per day of meteoric matter arrives on earth. This is sufficient to add an inch to the earth’s radius in 1000 million years if distributed equally over the globe. The professor says the extra weight will shorten the length of the year. The alarming fact is disclosed that in the brief space of a million years the year will bo a full thousandth part of a second shorter than it is to-day. That is what the professor says, and we will take his word for it. The good people who measure the inside of the Great Pyramid know, of course, that there won’t be any earth at all in a million years. But whether the rest of the solar system, to say nothing of the rest of the universe,-would go 'into mourning if the earth was snuffed out is a matter about which the reader will have to wait for information until he gets his special edition of the ‘’.Dominion” the morning after the event.

Britain’s biggest meteorite came down in 1902 ami was over nine pounds in weight. Earth’s biggest so far found came down in the same year in Mexico, and was about 13 feet by 6 feet by 5 feet and weighed 50 tons. In Arizona they are still prospecting for a meteor estimated by some optimists to contain 10.600,000 tons of iron. This made a crater nearly a mile wide, with a hole in it 450 feet deep and fourfifths of a mile across. The amount of rock it displaced on arriving is put at 350.000,000 tons. There is a 700-year-old cedar tree on the rim of the crater, so the meteor arrived before then, but it is thought to have come not more than 4000 or 5000 years before at: tlie outside. It has been bored for since 1903, but has yet to be found ami turned into motor-cars.