On the Meteors of ISth November, 1833. 325 



land which speak of individual meteors that were of great size and 

 that left behind them brilliant trains which continued brilliant for 



sev- 



eral minutes and assumed tortuous and other remarkable shapes. 

 Such as might identify them to observers over a wide region. Four 

 Of these, so widely separate in distance, time or direction that they 

 fcould not be confounded one with another, are known to have formed 

 their train into a cloud and sometimes to have floated away east- 

 ward as if borne by winds. 



The remark should be particularly attended to, that the appear- 

 ances, above described, were every where presented by the meteoric 

 shower, as far as our evidence reaches. The language of many 

 newspaper articles would lead to error by their having described the 

 meteors as proceeding in all directions and towards every quarter, 

 without noticing the fact that those which started out in any given 

 part of the heavens uniformly proceeded in a fixed direction; and the 

 fact that all the directions obeyed a regimen among themselves in re- 

 lation to a single point. Some, who did not notice this point, or ra- 

 diant^ have been misled by conceiving wrongly of its nature, — sup- 

 posing the word radiant to intend a spot whence the motions originated 

 and proceeded, and not^ merely a point through which the lines of 

 motion produced backward would have passed. It has thus come 

 to pass that the existence of this radiant has been discredited, in par- 

 ticular places, by individuals who had observed that the motions orig- 

 inated and proceeded from every assignable spot in the hemisphere, 

 a fact certainly true, and certainly consistent with the fact first spo- 

 ken of. Again, the failure of numerous observers in particular dis- 

 tricts to notice the radiant has led, in some cases, to the suspicion 

 of its non-appearance at these places : Prof. Olmsted himself ap- 

 pears to have wavered on this subject, in the early part of his me- 

 moir, out of regard to the strong testimony of intelligent observers 

 that, particularly, of Doct. A. Smith, of North Carolina, which 

 will be found at p. 379 in that memoir. But it is evident in the first 

 place, from the language used, that Doct. Smith, was not speaking 

 of the radiant which has been described as the invariable attendant 

 of the meteoric shower, but of a supposed origin of the motions; 

 and next it is evident that the one body whose motion he has par- 

 ticularly described was in fact moving from the very region in which 

 the radiant must have been, to have conformed to its location in nu- 

 merous other places. It is also a fact that, in places where the ra- 

 diant did certainly show itself so evidently, that it would have seemed 

 impossible, for it to pass unobserved, it failed to attract the no- 



