II. Cluster of Star Showers at Time Expected

Just as many were pointing out definite events in nature as evident heralds of the sixth seal and of the “time of the end,” and were expectantly awaiting further developments; and just as a great revival in the study of prophecy was definitely under way at this very time the unparalleled shower of “Leonid” meteors burst over North America on November 13, 1833. These came at the peak of a series of lesser but spectacular November showers in Europe and West Asia (1831-1839), ^{15For a description of this series of Leonid showers and an explanation of these and other periodical meteors, see Appendix B.} and came to be interpreted by many as a fulfillment in the prophetic sequence. ^{16Those who regarded the 1833 falling of the stars as the outstanding fulfillment of the prophecy often spoke of other showers of 1799, 1832, etc., or 1866 and 1867. And some came to contend that these “celestial signs” predicted by Christ as latter-day signals to men were not logically to be confined just to the Western world; that a single fulfillment even though the most conspicuous one would not necessarily seem to exhaust the prophetic specifications. It was pointed out that the fact of these signs being actually seen in both the Old World and the New merely strengthened them as worldwide signs heralding the “time of the end,” and that the use of natural means was not incompatible with a divine purpose. It was the timing in relation to the 1260 year-days and the sixth seal that was stressed.} Thrice in less than a century (1799-1868) the great Leonid stream of meteors swung its dense swarm of cosmic particles athwart earth’s path in an unparalleled series of great meteoric showers, giving different parts of the globe outstanding displays of celestial fireworks. But one of those displays so far surpassed the others as to go down in history as the great star shower, that of 1833 and in popular reminiscence merely as “the falling of the stars.” ^{17The scientific observations of that 1833 shower led eventually to the discovery that shooting stars were not, as had been commonly believed, local atmospheric phenomena, but small dark, cosmic particles flashing briefly into incandescence generated by the friction of the final plunge from empty space into our denser atmosphere. It also led to the astonishing discovery that the Leonids and other periodic meteors come from swarms, or streams, of small particles traveling in vast elliptical paths in pur solar system, paths which periodically intersect the earth’s orbit. “If the Earth crosses this path strewn with meteoric material, the Earth is sprinkled, or, in other words, we have a meteoric shower.” (Clyde Fisher and Marian Lockwood, Astronomy, pp. 89, 90.) The word shower is used in the technical sense of an unusual number of meteors belonging to a group, not necessarily a spectacular “rain” of shooting stars all at once as we have in the comparatively rare” showers.}PFF4 293.1