The Astronomy of the Bible

ur world. Now and then they come, but we cannot foretell their coming. Such an aerolite exp

break many windows, and in some cases to shake down partitions. The sky was clear, and the sun shining brightly, when a white cloud, bordered with

somewhat peculiar to aerolites; the nearest terrestrial affinity of the minerals aggregated in them, is to be found in the volcanic products from great depths. Thus aerolites seem to be broken-up fragments from the interior parts of globes like our own. They do not come from our own volcanoes, for the velocities with which they entered our atmosphere prove their c

ne. There are hundreds of accounts of the falls of aerolites during the past 2,500 years. The Greeks and Romans considered them as celestial omens, and kept some of them in temples. One at Mecca is revered by the faithful Mohammedans, and Jehangir, the great Mogul, is said to have had a sword forged from an iron a

that the city of the Ephesians is temple-keeper of the g

ites, probably mere particles of dust, and for the most part are entirely consumed in our upper atmosphere, so that they do not actually reach the earth. The swarms travel along paths that resemble cometary orbits; they are very elongated el

ers of the same swarm by their agreement in direction and date. The swarms move in a closed orbit, and it is where this orbit intersects that of the earth that we get a great "star shower," if both earth and swarm are present together at the intersection. If the swarm is drawn out, so that many mete

n the night of Saturday, on the last day of Muharram, stars shot hither and thither in the heavens, eastward and westward, and flew against one another, like a scattering swarm of locusts, to the right and left." There are not records of all the returns of this meteoric swarm between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth, but when the earth encountered it in 1799, Humboldt reported that "from the beginning of the phenomenon there was not a space in the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon that was not filled every instant with bolides

WER OF 1799,

rida, by Mr. Andr

ly at that time the planet captured them for the sun. But we cannot doubt that some such similar sight as they have afforded us suggested the imagery employed by the Apostle St. John when he wro

Isaiah used a ve

lled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the l

e is that employed by St. John in hi

heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the t

of darkness for ever," may have been drawn from meteors rather than from co

d before sunrise in the east in the autumn, and known to the Arabs as the "False Dawn," does not appear to be mentioned in Scripture. Some commentators wrongly cons

ine, seems clearly indicated in one passage. "Out of the north cometh golden splendour" would wel