116 COSMOS. 



at Bra,unsberg, in Prussia, only saw on the same night, which 

 was there uninterruptedly clear, a few sporadic shooting stars 

 fall, between seven o'clock in the evening and sunrise the 

 next morning. Bessel* concluded from this, " that a dense 

 group of the bodies composing the great ring, may have 

 reached that part of the Earth in which England is situated, 

 whilst the more eastern districts of the Earth might be passing 

 at the time through a part of the meteoric ring proportion- 

 ally less densely studded with bodies." If the hypothesis of a 

 regular progression, or oscillation of the nodes, should acquire 

 greater weight, special interest will be attached to the inves- 

 tigation of older observations. The Chinese annals, in which 

 great falls of shooting stars, as well as the phenomena of 

 comets, are recorded, go back beyond the age of Tyrtacus, or 

 the second Messenian war. They give a description of two 

 streams in the month of March, one of which is 687 years 

 anterior to the Christian era. Edward Biot has observed 

 that, amongst the fifty-two phenomena which he has collected 

 from the Chinese annals, those that were of most frequent 

 recurrence, are recorded at periods nearly corresponding with 

 the 20th and 22nd of July, o. s., and might consequently be 

 identical with the stream of St. Lawrence's day, taking into 

 account that it has advanced since the epochs f indicated. If 

 the fall of shooting stars of the 21st of October, 1366, o. s. 

 (a notice of which was found by the younger Von Boguslaw- 

 ski, in Benessius de Horowic's Chronicon Ecclesice Pragensis}, 

 be identical with our November phenomenon, although the 

 occurrence in the fourteenth century was seen in broad day- 

 light, we find by the precession in 477 years, that this system 

 of meteors, or rather its common centre of gravity, must 

 describe a retrograde orbit round the Sun. It also follows, 



* From a letter to myself, dated Jan. 24th, 1838. The enormous 

 -gwarm of falling stars, in November, 1799, was almost exclusively seen 

 In America, where it Avas witnessed from New Herrnhut in Greenland, 

 to the equator. The swarms of 1831 and 1832 were visible only in 

 Europe, and those of 1833 and 1834 only in the United States of North 

 America. 



f Lettre de M. Edouard Biot a M. Quetelet, sur les anciennes appari- 

 tions d'Etoiles Filantes en Chine, in the Bull, de PAcademie de Bruxelles, 

 1843, t. x. No. 7, p. 8. On the notice from the Chronicon Ecdesiw 

 Pragensis, see the younger Boguslawski iix Poggend. Annalen, bd. 

 xlviii. s. 612. 



