ee. 
Fan. 9, 1873] 
appeals of this kind. Every crag and dell around seems 
to beckon us to its side that it may set problems before us 
for solution. Part of the work of the winter will lie in 
availing ourselves of these opportunities. We shall make 
visits to the hills and quarries of the neighbourhood, and 
test the lessons of the lecture-room by actual seeing and 
handling of the rocks, 
Thus, while we gain larger conceptions of the structure 
and history of the planet on which we dwell, we shall at 
the same time perform no unimportant part in that long 
education which, though it stands out more prominently 
a our earlier years, is not less surely the business of our 
ives, 
E THE RECENT STAR SHOWER 
CONSIDERABLE number of exact determinations 
- ofthe place of the radiant-point of the shooting 
stars recorded during the recent meteoric shower have 
during the last few days continued to reach me, of which 
the accompanying general list and a rough outline map 
(Fig. 2) will, perhaps, best convey the general result at 
present arrived at regarding this important point in con- 
nection with the astronomical character of its appearance. 
That the stream of meteors, originating in the materials 
of Biela’s comet, pursue, in a current of great length and 
thickness, nearly the same orbit as that of the comet 
round the sun, may be clearly concluded from the many 
observations of the meteor shower which have now been 
brought together. Among the most interesting of the 
descriptions relating to this subject is a report by Dr. 
Heis, of Miinster, in Westphalia, of the observations 
‘made at that observatory between 8h. and 9h. P.M., and 
of others which he received from distant places, of the 
Es oid of the meteors at that and at later periods of 
he night. The number seen by two observers at 
Munster, in fifty-three minutes, between 8h. and gh. P.M., 
was 2,200 meteors, 400 of which appeared in the last 
interval but one of six minutes before 9 o’clock, or about 
forty-two per minute during the whole time. At the Got- 
tingen Observatory 7,710 meteors were counted in three 
hours, giving nearly the same average of frequency 
during the greater portion of the shower. At Svan- 
holmsminde, in the north of Jutland, Mr. S. Tromholdt 
recorded, with the assistance of two observers, 600 shoot- 
ing stars in the first quarter of an hour after 9 o’clock, or 
about forty per minute, as observed at Munster. Allow- 
ing at the latter place thirty minutes, and in Jutland forty 
minutes, as their longitudes in time, east from Green- 
wich, the great abundance of the meteors here noted 
nearly coincides with the second principal maximum of 
the shower seen by Mr. Lowe and Ly Prof. Grant, at 
Glasgow, to have occurred at about, or shortly after, 
8 o’clock, From the same time until 1th. 30m. P.M. 
(toh. 50m. Greenwich time), Mr. Tromholdt counted 
1,660 meteors in two hours and a half, ‘indicating a 
greatly decreased intensity of the shower; and, although 
clouds then prevented further observations, a perfectly! 
clear sky enabled him to resume them at alf-past | 
4 o'clock A.M. (3h. 5om. Greenwich time) on the morning 
_of the 28th, when he found the display to have entirely 
ceased, only four shooting stars making their appearance 
; during the hour between half-past 4 and _ half-past 
¢ 5 o'clock, or about 4 o’clock, Greenwich time. 
In NATURE, vol. vii. p. 86, the observations of Mr. W. 
Swan, at St. Andrews, show that the termination of the 
shower had actually arrived at an earlier hour on the 
morning of the 28th, since, the sky being quite clear at 
half-past 1 9’clock A.M., no shooting stars could then be 
seen. A writer on the appearance of the shower at 
Dublin informs me that his observations fully corrobo- 
rated this result, for, on looking out at about 1 o'clock, 
NATURE 
- = . . . = 2 ! 
_ Fortunately we meet in a district rich in incentives to 
185 
(Irish, or nearly half-past 1 o’clock Greenwich time), 
the number of meteors was found to have diminished to 
about one in two or three minutes, and during a quarter 
of an hour after about half-past 2 o’clock, Greenwich 
time, not a single shooting star appeared in sight, 
although there was then always sufficient clear sky to 
enable one observer to have an uninterrupted field of 
view of the constellations. Both the extent of the densest 
portion and the limits of the extreme boundary of the 
stream are excellently marked by these valuable observa- 
tions. There appears without doubt to have been a 
period of nearly uniform maximum intensity, lasting 
from shortly after 6 to shortly before 8. o’clock P.M., in 
which one observer might, under the most favourable 
circumstances, count from fifty to a hundred meteors 
per minute, or on’ an average about one meteor per 
second, The duration of this period seems to have been 
about an hour and a half, its centre occurring at about, 
or very shortly after, 7 o’clock. For about two hours 
after it, the shower lessened so gradually as not to fall 
much below a quarter of its maximum intensity until 
nearly 10 o’clock, but from that time it continued to 
decline so rapidly that soon after midnight one observer 
scarcely counted so many as one meteor per minute, and 
by 2 o’clock A.M. it had entirely disappeared. Taking 
its gradual rise before 7 o’clock to have been similar to 
its rate of diminution afterwards, and the whole time of 
its visibility to have been divisible into periods of two 
hours each, of which the central one, of greatest intensity, 
occurred between 6 and 8 o’clock P.M., and three others, 
on either side of this, might be distinguished as copious, 
conspicuous, and hardly more than ordinary meteoric 
displays, it is easy to estimate, from the known inclina- 
tion at which the earth’s path crosses the axis of the 
stream, the thickness of the meteoric stratum which it 
traversed in each of these successive periods. Theactual 
width or transverse thickness of each of these meteoric 
strata must have been about 50,000 miles, and that of 
their whole sum, consisting of seven such pericds, was 
about 350,000 miles, The diameter of the visible nebu- 
losity of Biela’s comet, as it was observed in telescopes, 
was estimated at 40,000 miles, and the nearest approach 
of its orbit to that of the earth, in 1832, was computed to 
be about 17,000 miles, so that the thickness of the 
meteor stream which the earth passed through on Nov. 
27 last, exceeds these calculated dimensions by very many 
times. That it was, however, not the tail, or envelope, of 
the comet through which the earth passed, but a stream 
of particles left behind the nucleus of the comet on its 
track, was pointed out by a Dutch observer, and writer 
on the astronomical features of the shower (Herr Van de 
Stadt), in the Arnwhemsche Courant, referred toin NATURE, 
vol. vii. p. 86. He founds this on the consideration that if, as 
the most probable calculations by Mr. Hind of the comet’s 
path at this return inform us, it passed its perihelion on 
or about Oct. 6 last, and therefore, through its node, and 
its nearest point of approach to the earth’s orbit about 
Sept. 14 last, it must, at the time of the occurrence of 
the meteor shower, have advanced some 250,000,000 ~ 
miles, or about a seventh part of the whole circumference 
of its orbit along its path, having already passed its 
perihelion, and proceeded nearly as far as the orbit of 
the planet Mars in its subsequent departure from the 
sun, and its distant approach towards the opposite part 
of its orbit from the earth. , 
Projecting all the meteor-tracks which were recorded 
from my point of view, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, upon a 
plane perspective chart of the constellations, a very 
evident centre of divergence of the shower from a space 
round a spot in R.A. 20°, N. Decl. 40°, is very clearly 
shown by the backward prolongations of the tracks, 
about 60 per cent. of which pass within 4° or 5° of this 
place. Many of the tracks recorded were somewhat 
widely erratic, coming chiefly from a more northerly 
