1879.] 071 the Stonj of the November Meteors. 43 



iiictoors Avas pouring across our patli. The earth then passed throngli 

 the swarm, just as you might imagine a speck, too small to be seen by 

 the eye, to be carried on the point of a fine needle in a sloj^ing direc- 

 tion through the thread which re])resents the meteors. Tlie earth 

 took about live hours to i);iss through the stream ; and it was Europe, 

 Asia, and Africa, which happened at tlie time to be moving forwards. 

 Accordingly it was upon this side of the earth on that occasion, that 

 the meteors were poured, and they produced the gorgeous display in 

 our atmosphere which many here nmst remember. In 18G7, when wc 

 came round again to the same place, the stream of meteors was still 

 there. America, this time, chanced to be the part of the globe which 

 was turned in the right position to receive the shower. In 18G8, the 

 miglity swarm had not passed, and in subsequent years, when we came 

 round to the proper place, we still found ourselves among outlying 

 stragglers of the great procession. 



[The lecturer next attempted to give an outline of the successive 

 steps by which the jiath over which the meteors travel had been deter- 

 mined, and in doing so had an opportunity of adding other particulars 

 to the marvellous history of these bodies.] 



HUMBOLDT. 



In 1799 Humboldt was travelling in South America, and on the 

 morning of the 12th of November in that year the November shower 

 was poured out over the New World. Humboldt's description of this 

 shower seems first to have fixed the attention of scientific men u2)on 

 the subject. But he contributed still more to the advance of our 

 knowledge by the success with which he insisted that nearly all such 

 phenomena are periodic, and that therefore there is reason to hope 

 that the causes of them are discoverable. Shortly after, the periodic 

 character of the August meteors was established ; and when the next 

 return of the November meteors to the earth took place, when there 

 was a magnificent display of them exhibited to Europe in 1832, and a 

 still more impressive spectacle seen in America in the following year, 

 the attention of scientific men was thoroughly aroused. 



PROFESSOR H. A. NEWTON. 



In England, meteors began to be systematically observed, and in 

 this way all that knowledge about them has been acquired which was 

 referred to in the beginning of the lecture. In France, the records of 

 antiquity and the annals of distant nations were ransacked ; and by 

 this most useful antiquarian search, no less than ten visits of the No- 

 vember swarm, previous to the shower observed by Humboldt in 1799, 

 have been brought to light. But the first great step towards gaining 

 a knowledge of their orbit was made by Professor H. Newton, of New 

 Haven in America, who published in 1864 two memoirs, in which he 

 discussed all the accounts that had been collected, extending back to 



