377), and
found a retrogression of temperature amounting to 2.2 degrees Fahr. from the
11th to the 13th of May, a period at which nearly the most rapid advance of
heat takes place. It is much to be desired that this phenomenon of
depressed temperature, which some have felt inclined to attribute to the
melting of the ice in the northeast of Europe, should be also investigated
in very remote spots, as in America, or in the southern hemisphere. (Comp.
'Bull. de l'Acad. Imp. de St. P??tersbourg', 1843, t. i., No. 4.)
The Greek natural philosophers, who were but little disposed to pursue
observations, but evinced inexhaustible fergility of imagination in giving
the most various interpretation of half-perceived facts, have, however, left
some hypotheses regarding shooting stars and meteoric stones which
strikingly accord with the views now almost universally admitted of the
cosmical process of these phenomena. "Falling stars," says Plutarch, in his
life of Lysander,* are, according to the opinion of some physicists, not
eruptions of the ethereal fire extinguished in the air immediately after its
ignition, nor yet an inflammatory combustion of the air, which is dissolved
in large quantities in the upper regions of space, but these meteors are
rather a fall of celestial bodies, which, in consequence of a certain
intermission in the rotatory force, and by the impulse of some irregular
movements, have been hurled down not only to the inhabited portions of the
Earth, but also beyond it into the great ocean, where we can not find them.
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