The New York Herald, in publishing a number of newspaper and correspondents' accounts of the meteoric phenomenon which took place on Friday night, and which was noticed in Saturday's Press, publishes the following interesting editorial remarks:
"At about a quarter before ten o'clock on Friday evening, the atmosphere being very sultry, and no perceptible motion in the air, a light cloud appeared in the west, from which a blue-tinted luminous globe shot out, which at the first glance suggested to the spectators the idea of an artificial fire-work. Instantly it lost its globular form, bursting, like an immense skyrocket, into four portions. The first two are represented by one of our correspondents as resembling brilliant illuminated chandeliers, with innumerable jets of purple flame ; the others were globular and comparatively small, appearing rather as the tails of the first. They maintained their relative distances as they flew athwart the sky from west to east, occupying in their flight something like a minute. Whether they vanished in air or fell on the land or sea have not yet ascertained. About a minute after their passage a detonation was heard, as from a piece of ordnance ; but whether it preceeded from the bursting of the meteor is a matter or conjecture.
"One very curious optical delusion which it gave rise to is worthy of remark. To the spectators it appeared to be no higher than from a quarter to half a mile, and to be almost directly over their heads, and yet, when the fact is considered that it was witnessed under almost identical circumstances at Philadelphia, some ninety miles south west of New York ; at New Haven, eighty miles east ; at Barneget, forty miles south, and at Newburg, on the Hudeon, sixty miles north, it will be perceived that the idea of its insignificant elevation was most delusive. It must have been at an immense elevation to have been seen at these widely remote points, and to have presented at all of them the same appearance of being so nearly in the zenith.
"It is also to be remained in connection with the meteor, that for the previous two or three nights brilliant flashes of the aurora borealis have illuminated the northern skies?a most unusual display in the dog-days, and one which we only look for in the late fall and winter months. The aurora is generally supposed to indicate clear cold weather, but in this case it has been followed by an oppressively sulture chateredfs dfdf atmosphere, thus contradicting our previously conceived notions. It is also very closely connected in point of time with the solar eclipse, which took place last Wednesday morning.
"Meteors, lile comets and eclipses, have been, from the remotest antiquity, regarded as portentous omens. It is hard to get rid of such superstitions ideas. Even in modern times, and notwithstanding the flood of light thrown by scientific men upon all natural phenomena, people cannot entirely divert themselves of this fooling. In the poem describing the downfall of Poland, it is related that on that terrible night of carnage when Kosolu-ke fell,
'Farth shook, red meteors flashed along the sky,
And curious nature shuddered at the ery.'
"To many the meteor of Friday night recalled the memory of that summer night, twenty-eight years ago, when the remarkable meteoric display, known as the shower of stars, tank pisce, and which preceded, if it did not introduce, that terrible plague, the Asiatic cholera. There may be reason for supposing that those disturbances of the atmosphere, which produce meteoric displays may affect more or less the elements which sustain animal life ; but human knowledge is so limited in that regard, and speculations on such subjects are so often found destitute of foundation, that all such apprehensions may safely be dismissed, and that those who saw this magnificent display of celestial fireworks may, without any alarm, felicitate themselves on having witnessed the most sublime spectacle of the century."