BOMBARDMENT OF THE EARTH.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2743, 7 January 1882, Page 2

BOMBARDMENT OF THE EARTH.

“ It’s lucky for us that the earth baa such a good bomb-proof on the skyward side,” said the astronomer, ns he stood coatless and bare-headed on the roof, watching the meteors. “ Why ?" asked the reporter, panting as he clambered up through the scuttlehole. “ You’d have seen reason enough if you had been up here with me for the last two hours,” said the astronomer. “ Why, the earth has been undergoing a regular bombardment. Its not over yet. Look at that fellow, how he skims ! You would call it a shooting star. Well, there’s as much reason for culling it a celestial shell. That meteoroid was moving twenty or thirty miles a second, yet it could not get through the bomb proof that protects the earth.” “ Where is the bomb-proof ?” “ Why, right under your nose ; all around you : it’s the atmosphere. When the meteoroids strike the air that serrounds the earth the heat produced in consequence of their tremendous ve locity runs up a million degrees or more a second, and in a twinkling they are changed to vapor. If they could get through the atmosphere they would make it lively for us. No man could tell at what instant he might be struck down by a shot from the sky, for meteoroids are plunging into the atmosphere all the time at the rate of several millions a day over the whole earth. A t certain times, as about the 10th of August and the 13th November, they come in showers and fairly bombard the earth. The soft air that fans the cheek is to most of these projectiles as impenetrable as a wall of steel. Some of them, however, are able to penetrate to the earth, but they are comparatively very few in number. When a meteoroid strikes the earth it is called an aerolite. No good museum is without one or more specimens of these black-crusted iron-like bodies. Humboldt relates that two Swedish sailors were killed by an aerolite on board their ship in 1674. The thatched roofs of houses have been set on fire by aerolites, and sheep and other animals have been struck dead in the fields by them. And there are besides imodern instances enough. We are no safer than our forefathers. Hardly a year passes without one or more masses of meteoric stone falling in the neighborhood of human habitations. A man is in more danger of being killed by lightning than by an aerolite, but it would not be so if the air did not protect him.”— “ American Journal.”