Star Shower in 1838

jaJZ. 16, 1873! NATURE - · - - - -·· - - - - ·- - - - ____ ___ ·----- _____203 _ ... , !e ;tor and rccci I'Cr, .detachable from other, but it is.{wised on II Oil the page reptoduc. es' M. Mollha,usen's drawing.of two a pivot projecting from the floor below, into a coniCal caviiy in Mojave In<lims, descrihet! iri vol. Iii. of Pacific R: R. the hott<nn of the receiver. . It is also in a square box, l{eports, by Messrs. Whipple, Ewbank, aild Turner. As the fr,)!ll which, in each case, the cylinder is remnveable entire for Mohawk Jndiaris of New York and the No•th-west are so totally emptying the contents, and the r11.infall admits of being distinct from the Colorado Mojaves, I thought it desirable to call attention to the error. in the sa1nc way hy scales or glass A full-sized mudd of this instrument has hecn made, and was M. Figuier, l notice, in other portions of his work, finds the exhibited at the annual meeting of the Scottish Meteorologica.l origin of the Jl difficult problem to Society in July last, and a notice of it appeared in the account solve, and. I think contradicts himself: Ue on page IJJ of the proceedings of the meeting in the Edinburgh papers of "u!11ess we regard as . a .so!ttary exceptiOn .i':mong July 4, 1872. It has likewise been exhibited at the Meteorobemgs, unless we wtthdraw them froin the operation of the logical Office, Vic toria Street, London, and its construction has universal laws of nature, we lnust come to the conclusioii that peen of hY. several naval officers, and others specially they do but form a certain nuniber bt races of one .and the same specic5, and all de,scend from one primitive unique species.;, lnler.e sted in rainfall. :1 may,ad<1 that gatm'es being consh:udecl, .with .the I do grant that it must have been a very unique species, v1ew ot being used on board such steamers .as permit of whose descendants could have varied to the extent that man bas. under the superintendence of inlctesled and But it is not the question of variation of species. that I wish t6 allude to, but the geography of the in speaking of sc1fntific officers, hope by-and-by_ io he enabled to lo lhc .readers of what M. Figuier calls "the red race, 'pp. 404-406 he states-:J:ii.An ; RF. some . results of the made by these gauges, " The Indians cannot be accurately brought into con'nectlon with whtcl1 may lead to an introduction of such as part either the white, yellow, or brown race;" and again,." Probably of a ship's _e quipment, and so to ptit them in possession of some the population which existed in the new world before the arrival of the Europeans made up of several types different fr<ini tmshvorlhy observations of ihe ralnf:ill se<i that are extant at present in the other regions of the globes, _types W. J. BtAcic having a great tendency to modify themselves, and which were obliteratecl whenever they came in conlact with the raceS Eui'oj1P; Star Shower in iSjS But to re-ascend back to this primordial populatioll would 1 not sure that the extract from my note-book now be impossible." There is here a plain aclu1owledgautochthonic American people, modimay not have been printed by the British hut even ment of a This latter in that case it may be thought suitable for reproduction :it lhe fled since by contact with European . races, contact we believe, of course, . to be purely imaginative ; present juncture. "1838. De c. 7· ·-A great number of falling stars we:re ob· but if there was an autochthonous people in America, as the "primordial population" of Figuier Is supposed to serverl hdween (jh a1Hl 7'•. I11 about half-an-hour 40 were counted, sometimes by one, two, sometimes three be, how th<:"n can "all (men) descend from one primitive observers-two at a medium. They were of all magnitudes up unique 'pecies?" M. Figuicr does not believe in the evolution to the first: the larger dissolved into a train of light, hut left no of man from some pithecoid _creature; he claims to have "si)9wn train them : the S. and W, quarters were chiefly observed, . . . . that man is not dcriyed . . . • from any animal." How but their prevalence seemed to be universal : they all fell in this stand can be taken, and stlll the unity of the race asserted nearly a vertical direction, hut those in the N. \V, and S. E. to be tme, we cannot understand : for surely it cannot be (ienied although quarters incline<! towards the S. \V. The colour of the more now, that man was once lower than the lowest co nspi euous oEes seemed to verge towards orange. Their chffercnt from modern savages ; and, as in America there have as courses w <: lC of no lcagth . wr,s at tl'e same: time a L>een found traces of man's presence, as old fossil men have becnfound In Calipale the 1'<. horimn fmm N.\V.to N.E., those found ir. Europr. ; apparently C<lllally ex tended on si<lc of the true merhlian . fornia ; and drift implements in the rher aravels ·o f the Delaware The .Meteor; were not watched after 7h, hut about 11h upon Valley, on the opposite side of the Continent ; and a_<; these one, the only one in several mi:mtes, ,in implements, in part, show that their fa.,hionets were little if looking out again I the S . \V. ; but it had no longer a vert ical diredion, its course any, in advance of the beings first \vonhy to be called how could they have descended from a stock in common Wi.dt pointing now to the N. W. ''Fo r account of this phenomenon as obse rved by l\'lr. Maverly the European and Asiatic races? It must have been, indeed, at Gosport, see 'Proceedings ot the Meteorological Society a unique species, whose nearest relations spread over the whole contiuent of North America; or starting somewhere on the during the scs,ion 1:).)!>-1839.' p. 9· " Pacific coast, finally reached the Atlantic, yet made no advanceT. W. \VEil!! learned nothing in a slow overland journey of three thousand mile$. The "primordial population," of whiCh .r-.t Figuier speaks, we doubt not originated in America; _ its pithecoid Salmonidre of Great Britain ancestry may have been European or Asiatic, but if so, the "old IN reply to the Rev. W. S. Symonds's questions (NATllRE, Vol. world" monkey was somewhat Americanised before it evolved If there vii . p. 162) regan ling the occurrence of certain salmonoids in \Velsh that peculiar red-race which we call the Indians. and non-glacial lakes, T beg to draw his attention to the s.ixth ever was land communication between South America and the volume of 1he "Catalogue of Fishes," published by the_ trustees "old world" tropics, this pithecoid man may have reached 't he of the British Museum, which, I helieve, contains the mforma- shores of the Southern Continent, and lost the ape-like charaction for which he asks. I would with pleasure extract this in- ters after his arrival. Either evolved thus, or created dt ntnJo, formation for him if I were not ignorant as regards the glacial as M. Figuier claims, the savage is purely an or non glacial character of some of t,he lakes. The geographic (...truncated)