TO-DAY IN HISTORY

Southland Times, Issue 20641, 13 November 1928, Page 4

TO-DAY IN HISTORY

NOVEMBER 13. Born: St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, Tagaste, Numidia, 354; Pelagius, antagonist of St. Augustine, 354; Edward 111., king of England, Windsor, 1312; Philip Beroaldus, the Elder, scholar and critic, Bologna, 1450. Died: Justinian, Roman emperor, 565; Malcolm Canmore, king of Scotland, Alnwick, 1093; Thomas Erpenius, orientalist, Leyden, 1642; William Etty, painter, York, 1849; Sir John Forbes, physician and medical writer, Reading, 1861. SHOOTING STARS. During three successive years, from 1831 to 1833, the 13th of November was marked by a magnificent display of shooting or falling stars. The first of these brilliant exhibitions was witnessed off the coast of Spain, and in the country bordering on the Ohio. The second is thus described by Captain Hammond of H.M.S. “Restitution,” who beheld it in the Red Sea off Mocha: “From one o’clock a.m. till after daylight there was a very unusual phenomenon in the heavens. It appeared like meteors bursting in every direction. The sky at the time was clear, the stars and moon bright with streaks of light and thin white clouds interspersed in the sky. On landing in the morning I inquired of the Arabs if they had noticed the above. They said they had been observing it most of the night. I asked them if ever the like had appeared before. The oldest of them replied that it had not.” The area over which this phenomenon was seen extended from the Red Sea westward to the Atlantic, and from Switzerland to the Mauritius. But the most imposing display of shooting stars on record occurred on the third of these occasions, that is on the 13th November, 1833. It extended chiefly over the limits comprised between longitude 61 deg. in the Atlantic, and 100 deg. in Central Mexico, and from the latitude of the Great Lakes of North America to the West Indies. From the appearance presented it might be regarded as a grand and portentous display of nature’s fireworks. Seldom has a scene of greater or more awful sublimity been exhibited than at the Falls of Niagara on this memorable occasion, the two leading powers in nature, water and fire, engaging as it were, in an emulative display of their grandeur. The awful roar of the cataract, filled the mind of the spectator with an infinitely heightened sense of sublimity, while its waters were lighted up by the glare of the meteoric torrent in the sky. In many parts of the country the people were terror struck, imagining that the end of the world was come; whilst those whose education prevented them from yielding to such terrors, were nevertheless reminded of the passage in the Apocalypse, “The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of the mighty wind.” The most probable theory as to the nature of shooting stars is that they form part of the solar system revolving round the sun in the same manner as the planetoids, but both infinitely smaller in size and subject to great and irregular perturbations. The latter cause brings them not unfrequently within the limits of the earth’s atmosphere, on entering which they become luminous from the great heat produced by the sudden and violent compression which their transit occasions. Having thus approached the earth with great velocity they are as rapidly again withdrawn from it into the realms of space. It is very possible, moreover, that the fiery showers which we have just described may be the result of a multitude of these meteors encountering each other, whilst the aerolites, or actual meteoric substances, which occasionally fall to the surface of the earth, may be such of those bodies as have been brought so far within the influence of terrestrial gravity as to be rendered subject to its effects.