OBSERVATIONS OF LUMINOUS METEORS. 259 



stances of which, as far as they are yet known and investigated, will be 

 found described in the Appendix treating of Aerolites and of the pro- 

 gress of recent researches on them, at the end of the Report. Of similar 

 events and of large fireballs observed in foreign countries, the Committee 

 has also to record some other announcements which it has received. A 

 detonating meteor of unusual magnitude made its appearance in the 

 United States on the afternoon of November 20th, 1877, and was one of 

 unusual grandeur. As it was visible at Richmond and at towns of Vir- 

 ginia and North Carolina, where it exploded, all of them near the capital, 

 and was also seen by many persons in Washington itself, the inquiry 

 undertaken by Professor J. L. Campbell, of the Washington and Lee 

 University, regarding all the special characters of the great Virginia 

 meteor already in part successfully accomplished will, without doubt, con- 

 tribute some important additions to this department of our meteoric 

 knowledge. 



A fireball of the same description, scarcely less imposing, appeared (a 

 few days after the former one) in England on the evening of the 23rd of 

 November last, and was carefully described by a multitude of accounts of 

 it which were preserved, and which were communicated to Captain 

 Tupman. It appears to have been a member of a very well-known 

 meteor shower, whose shooting stars have often afforded plentiful and 

 pretty striking exhibitions in November, with a definite centre of 

 divergence in the head of Taurus. The " Taurids I.," as they have been 

 called, were very abundant in November, 1876, amounting to bright 

 showers, especially on the morning of November 20th in that year ; but 

 they were remarkable by a nearly total cessation of the stream last year 

 m the month when this great fireball appeared to compensate, apparently, 

 for the absence of the lesser meteors of the shower. It is premature, until 

 future cases of a similar kind corroborate such a conclusion, to infer that 

 aerolitic meteors are sometimes furnished by ordinary star-showers, since 

 radiant points of very different and independent meteor systems are' some- 

 times found to be closely adjacent to each other ; but the evidence thus 

 presented of such a connection existing between a meteor shower and an 

 aerolitic fireball certainly demands close attention and investigation, by 

 the certain determination which was made last year of an almost exact 

 resemblance between two such foreign visitants in the positions of their 

 radiant points. 



The orbit of a certain comet, it may be noticed (that of 1702), coincides, 

 as far as the rough observations of it that were obtained will perhaps 

 allow us to conclude, with the date and position of this double meteor 

 radiant-point ; and not less likelihood exists that the comet and the two 

 kinds of meteor-bodies formed members together of a common system 

 coursing round the sun, than that the aerolitic meteor itself was only a 

 very large individual of the meteor shower. Captain Tupman has com- 

 puted, on the other hand, the orbit of a smaller fireball which he saw on 

 the night of the 27th of November, 1877 ; and this meteor, he discovered, 

 had a nearly circular orbit, slightly inclined to the earth's, which it was 

 overtaking with a periodic time of revolution round the sun of only about 

 462 days. A large fireball was seen in full sunlight on the forenoon of 

 March 25th, 1878, travelling over the North Sea from the neighbourhood 

 of Berwick to that of Aberdeen. Its height and real path were very well 

 determined, and this large fireball appears to have been directed in its 

 real orbit very nearly straight from the sun towards the earth. The next 



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