128 COSMOS. 



The stream of the November asteroids has occasionally 

 only been visible in a small section of the Earth. Thus, for 

 instance, a very splendid meteoric shoiver vi^as seen in England 

 in the year 1837, w^hile a most attentive and skillful observer 

 at Braunsberg, 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, while the 

 more eastern districts of the Earth might be passing at tht- 

 time through a part of the meteoric ring proportionally lesi- 

 densely studded with bodies." If the hypothesis of a regular 

 progression or oscillation of the nodes should acquire greatei 

 weight, special interest will be attached to the investigation 

 0^ 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 Tyrtseus, or the sec- 

 ond 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, among 

 the fifty -two phenomena which he has collected from the 

 Chinese annals, thosQ that were of most frequent recurrence 

 are recorded at periods nearly corresponding with the 20th 

 and 22d 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 epochsf 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 Boguslawski, in 

 Benessius de Horowic's Ckronicon Ecclesice Pragensis), be 

 identical with our November phenomenon, although the oc- 

 currence 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 center of gravity, must de- 



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

 swarm of falling stax's in November, 1799, was almost exclusively seen 

 in America, where it was witnessed from New Herruhut in Greenland 

 to the equator. The sw^ai'ms of 1831 and 1832 were visible only iu 

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

 America. 



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

 tions d'Etoiles Filantes en Chine, in the Bull, de V Acadimie de Brux' 

 elles, 1843, t. x., No. 7, p. 8. On the notice from the Ckronicon Ec- 

 clesice Pragensis, see the younger Boguslawski, in Poggend., Annalert, 

 bd. xlviii., s. 612. 



