Meteorological observations and essays / By John Dalton.

  • John Dalton
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Meteorological observations and essays / By John Dalton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    232/280 (page 206)
    to S. nearly on the magnetic meridian, could not, from my own observation, have moved with a ve- locity much differing from ten miles in a second, which is probably greater than that of the thunder- bolt. Whilst I saw the meteor, the marked and well defined front of the ball, the long train or tail gradually diminishing in brilliancy as it receded, and a wavering motion of the whole meteor, all denoted motion in a resisting medium. I did not hear any report after the meteor was gone, pro- bably because I did not wait for, or expect one. But a report resembling thunder was noticed by two of those persons who described the meteor from York, one or more from Windsor ; and reference is made to similar accounts from Kent. Now it ap- pears to me much more rational to ascribe the commencement of the reports heard at York, at Windsor, and in Kent, to the concussion of the at- mosphere at the nearest point of the path of the meteor to those places respectively, and that the sound died away as the two equal distances of those points from the observers increased, as has been explained above for thunder. There were about ten of those large meteors seen in the course of the last century, as described in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Mr. Brypone saw one, February 10th 1772, at Berwick ; he counted 5 min. 7 seconds between the appearance and sound from the meteor ; another gentleman in the neighbourhood also saw the same, and heard the report some minutes afterwards, but