History About Welsh Peasants and Falling Stars

Among the Welsh peasants there is a belief that when a meteor falls to the earth it becomes reduced to a mass of jelly. This they name pwdre ser. The most plausible explanation offered for this fancy is that the autumn, the season when the largest number of meteors may be observed, is also the time of the year when the jelly-like masses of the plasmodium of Myxomycetes most frequently appear in the fields. A peasant who, after noting the apparent fall of a meteor, should go in search of it, might easily come across one of these lumps of plasma, and might well be induced to think that he had found all that was left of the meteor after its violent fall to the earth. Of course we have here to do with the apparent, not with the real, fall of a meteorite. In this connection it is interesting to note that the medusa, or jelly-fish, has been called a "fallen star" by sailors.

This Welsh fancy that meteors or "falling-stars" turned to a jelly when they struck the earth appears to have been quite general in Great Britain, and the jelly-like substance was variously named "star-slough," "star-shoot," "star-gelly" or "jelly," "star-fall'n." The Welsh pwdre ser literally means "star-rot." As early as 1641 Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) wrote the following lines which well describe the way in which these gelatinous substances came to be regarded as the remains of a "fallen star":

As he whose quicker eye doth trace

A false star shot to a mark'd place

Do's run apace,

And, thinking it to catch,