124 COSMOS. 



sands- The latter, which are compared by Arabian authors 

 to swarms of locusts, are periodic in their occurrence, and 

 move in streams, generally in a parallel direction. Among 

 periodic falls, the most celebrated are that known as the No- 

 vember phenomenon, occurring from about the 12th to the 

 14th of November, and that of the festival of St. Lawrence 

 (the 10th of August), whose "fiery tears" were noticed in 

 former times in a church calendar of England, no less than 

 in old traditionary legends, as a meteorological event of con- 

 stant recurrence.* Notwithstanding the great quantity of 

 shooting 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 loeriodicity 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 in North America between the 

 12th and 13th of November, 1833, and was observed by 

 Olmsted and Palmer. The stars fell, on this occasion, like 

 flakes of snow, and it was calculated that at least 240,P00 

 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 1799, first described by Ellicot and myself,t and which, by 



* Dr. Thomas Forster {^The Pocket Encyclopedia of Natural Phe- 

 nomena, 1827, p. 17) states that a manuscript is preserved in the hbra- 

 ry of Christ's College, Cambridge,^ written in the tenth century by a 

 monk, and entitled Ephemerides Rerum Naturalium, in which the nat- 

 ural phenomena for each day of the year are inscribed, as, for instance, 

 the first flowering of plants, the arrival of birds, &c. ; the 10th of Au- 

 gust is distinguished by the word " meteorodes." It was this indica- 

 tion, and the tradition of the fiery tears of St. Lawrence, that chiefly 

 induced Dr. Forster to undertake his extremely zealous investigation 

 of the August phenomena. (Qaetelet, Correspond. MatMm., Serie III., 

 t. i., 1837, p. 433.) 



t Humb., Pel. Hist., t. i., p. 519-527. EUicot, in the Transactions 

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

 ing 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 



a [No such manuscript is at present known to exist in the library of that college. 

 For this information I am indebted to the inquiries of Mr. Cory, of Pembroke Col- 

 lege, the learned editor of Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous, Greek and English, 

 1840.]— Tr. 



