112 COSMOS. 



stars and fire balls of the most various dimensions, which, 

 according to Kloden, were seen to fall at Potsdam, on the 

 night between the 12th and 13th of November, 1822, and on 

 the same night of the year in 1832, throughout the whole of 

 Europe, from Portsmouth to Orenburg on the Ural River, and 

 even in the Southern Hemisphere, as in the Isle of France, no 

 attention was directed to the periodicity of the phenomenon^ 

 and no idea seems to have been entertained of the connection 

 existing between the fall of shooting stars and the recurrence 

 of certain days, until the prodigious swarm of shooting stars 

 which Occurred i^. North America between the 12th and 13th 

 of November, 1833, and was observed by Olmsted and Palmer. 

 Tne stars fell, on this occasion, like flakes of snow, and it was 

 calculated that at least 240,000 had fallen during a period of 

 nine hours. Palmer of New Haven, Connecticut, was led, in 

 consequence of this splendid phenomenon, to the recollection 

 of the fall of meteoric stones in 1 799, first described by Ellicol 

 and myself.* arid which, by a comparison of the facts I had 

 adduced, showed that the phenomenon had been simultaneously 

 seen in the New Continent, from the equator to New Herrn- 

 hut in Greenland, (64 14' lat.) and between 46 and 82 

 long. The identity of the epochs was recognised with 

 astonishment. The stream, which had been seen from Jamaica 

 to Boston (40 21' lat.) to traverse the whole vault of heaven 

 on the 12th and 13th o* November, 1833, was again observed 

 in the United States in '34, on the night between the 13th 

 and 14th of November, although on this latter occasion it 

 showed itself with somewhat less intensity. In Europe the 

 periodicity of the phenomenon has since been manifested with 



jreat regularity. 

 Another and a like r ^ularly recurring phenomenon is that 



noticed in the month oi August, the meteoric stream of St. 

 Lawrence, appearing between the 9th and 14th of August. 



* Humb., Eel. Hist., t. i. pp. 519-527. Ellicot, in the Transaction* 

 of the American Society, 1804, vol. vi. p. 29. Arago makes the fol- 

 lowing observations in reference to the November phenomena : " We 

 thus become more and more confirmed in the belief that there exists a 

 zone composed of millions of small bodies, whose orbits cut the plane of 

 the ecliptic at about the point which our Earth annually occupies between 

 the llth and 13th of November. It is a new planetary world beginning 

 to be revealed to us." (Annuaire. 1836, p. 296.) 



