OBSERVATIONS OF LUMINOUS METEORS. 41 



In the following appendix of this interim Report some errors are cor- 

 rected of which the occurrence in the last two years' Reports passed 

 undetected until after the publication of the volumes in which they were 

 accidentally recorded. The earliest opportunity within its reach is now 

 taken by the Committee to rectify these errors and to point out some 

 errors in earlier Reports, to the appearance of which the brief survey of 

 those Reports required for preparing the above short outline of the whole 

 series ofthem has been the immediate occasion of drawing the Committee's 

 attention. In another appendix, by Dr. Walter Flight, the occurrences 

 of stonefalls, and abstracts of the analyses and discussions relating to 

 them, vrhich have taken place during the past year, are recorded. 



Appendix I. 



Revisions and Corrections of real paths of Meteors, and of other results of 

 ohservations contained in the Reports of the last two and of some prs- 

 ceding years. \ 



During the first years following the appointment of the Committee in 

 the year 1860 for the collection of meteor observations, the importance of 

 noting the radiant-points of observed meteors' tracks was not yet recog- 

 nised, and was far from being generally practised and regarded. The 

 real directions of flight of many shooting-stars and fireballs, the positions 

 of whose real courses were found from simultaneous observations during 

 several years previous to 1866, were accordingly only indicated, if at all, 

 by the altitude and azimuth of the point from which the meteor proceeded 

 or was directed in its line of flight towards the earth. Many of the 

 meteors of which the real paths were investigated from more or less 

 plentiful accounts of their appearance, in the appendices of these reports 

 for the years 1860-66, were brilliant and sometimes detonating fireballs, 

 besides some smaller shooting-stars. Among the adjustments needed to 

 accommodate the rough observations to each other the choice and deduc- 

 tion of the radiant-point had at that period of the Committee's first 

 proceedings not yet acquired the significancy with which on astronomical 

 grounds it has more recently been invested, the principal objects of those 

 earlier determinations having simply been to obtain the real heights and 

 the lengths of path and velocities of the meteors' flights. Fair weight for 

 determining the radiant-point was accordingly not always allowed to the 

 best recorded observations for this purpose ; and some obvious radiant- 

 points like those of the ' Leonids,' &c., not being then established," con- 

 siderable errors from this cause, and occasionally also from mistaken 

 calculations, have been detected in a review of the many real paths de- 

 scribed in the above-named part of these reports as regards the directions, 

 or as concerning the astronomical positions in right-ascension and declina- 

 tion of the radiant-points from which those fine meteors were directed. 

 The radiant-point positions given in the subjoined list sometimes differ 

 slightly, from fresh projections and comparisons of the best observations, 

 from those of the real paths adopted in the earlier reports. In cases 

 •where the errors discovered are, from various causes, of much larger 

 magnitude, however, than these small emendations of the original re- 

 ductions, the nature of the hitherto unnoticed misconstructions is stated 

 and explained in notes which are appended to the list. 



