carried luminous meteors in its train.[1] Finally Schiaparelli, in 1871, concluded an able Memoir on the subject with the decision that "a stellar origin for meteorites was the most likely and that meteorites were identifiable with shooting-stars"[2] A pregnant remark this, though not exactly as the author thought, for instead of proving both interstellar, as he intended, both have proved to be solar bound.
It was Professor Newton, in 1889, who first showed that meteorites were pursuing, as a rule, small elliptic orbits about the Sun, and that their motion was direct. He, too, was the first to surmise that meteorites are but bigger shooting-stars.
Now, as to their connection. Of direct evidence we have little. A few meteors have been observed to come from the known radiants of shooting-stars. Two instances we have of the fall of meteorites during star showers. One in 1095, when the Saxon Chronicle tells us stars fell "so thickly that no man could count them, one of which struck the ground and when a bystander cast water upon it steam was raised with a great noise of boiling." The second case was the fall of a siderite, eight pounds' worth of nickel-iron, at Mazapil during the Andromede shower of 1885, which was by
