hat have appeared within his knowledge, he
goes on to say:

"What sort of substance it must be, that could be so impelled and
ignited at the same time; there being no Vulcano or other Spiraculum of
subterraneous fire in the northeast parts of the world, that we ever yet
heard of, from whence it might be projected.

"I have much considered this appearance, and think it one of the hardest
things to account for that I have yet met with in the phenomena of
meteors, and I am induced to think that it must be some collection of
matter formed in the aether, as it were, by some fortuitous concourse
of atoms, and that the earth met with it as it passed along in its orb,
then but newly formed, and before it had conceived any great impetus of
descent towards the sun. For the direction of it was exactly opposite to
that of the earth, which made an angle with the meridian at that time
of sixty-seven gr., that is, its course was from west southwest to east
northeast, wherefore the meteor seemed to move the contrary way. And
besides falling into the power of the earth's gravity, and losing its
motion from the opposition of the medium, it seems that it descended
towards the earth, and was extinguished in the Tyrrhene Sea, to the
west southwest of Leghorn. The great blow being heard upon its first
immersion into the water, and the rattling like the driving of a cart
over stones being what succeeded upon its quenching; something like this
is always heard upon quenching a very hot iron in water. These facts
being past dispute, I would be glad to have the opinion of the learned
thereon, and what objection can be reasonably made against the above
hypothesis, which I humbly submit to their censure."(1)

These few paragraphs, coming as they do from a leading
eighteenth-century astronomer, convey more clearly than any comment the
actual state of the meteorological learning at that time. That this ball
of fire, rushing "at a greater velocity than the swiftest cannon-ball,"
was simply a mass of heated rock passing through our atmosphere, did not
occur to him, or at least was not credited. Nor is this surprising when
we reflect that at that time universal gravitation had been but recently
discovered; heat had not as yet been recognized as simply a form of
motion; and thunder and lightning were unexplained mysteries, not to
be explained for another three-quarters of a century. In the chapter on
meteorology we shall see how the solution of this my