400 Miscellanies. 



watched again in the S. for twelve or fifteen minutes, and counted ten 

 more, all of which had the same course as those before seen." 



2. Cincinnati, 0. N. lat. 39° 6' ; W. long. 84° 27'. Dr. John 

 Locke has published the following notice in the Daily Gazette of Cin- 

 cinnati, Aug. 14, 1841. " Meteors. — Mr. Editor. Sears C. Walker, 

 Esq., the astronomer of Philadelphia, has awarded to me the credit of 

 having discovered in 1834, the radiant point of the meteors which ap- 

 pear annually on or near the 10th of August. I had also discovered in 

 1835, their periodical return. They have since been noticed by the 

 philosophers of Europe. On the night of August 9, 1841, I observed 

 the tracks of several, with an altitude and azimuth instrument, made 

 for the purpose by Mr. James Foster, and found them to emanate from 

 the same point, the constellation Perseus, and to converge to the same 

 point, the constellation Lupus, as those of 1834. On the night of the 

 10th, observing from the top of the Bazaar, from nine to ten o'clock, 

 myself and assistant counted sixty meteors, forty nine of which con- 

 verged S. W. towards Lupus, and were mostly brilliant, rocket-like, 

 and left a phosphorescent track. The remaining twenty one moved 

 in a variety of directions, were small, and had a short track not phos- 

 phorescent. The forty nine parallel meteors had courses which 

 mostly, if prolonged, would fall between a and ^ of Perseus, and in the 

 opposite point in Lupus, towards which last point they all proceeded. 

 Two only had a considerable deviation, one tending to a point about 

 20° E. of Lupus, and the other about 14° W. of the same. As myself 

 and assistant could see only about one half of the visible heavens at 

 once, the meteors may be reckoned at sixty per hour. The night was 

 cleaj, a little hazy in the horizon ; wind N. W., with a slight aurora in 

 the north." 



Had these observations been continued until 4 A. M., the meteors 

 would undoubtedly have been found much more frequent. Between 

 three and four A. M., they were probably five or six times as numerous 

 as between ten and eleven of the evening previous. (See observations 

 of Aug. 9, 1840 ; this Jour., Vol. xl, p. 329.) This being assumed, it 

 results that on this occasion shooting stars were as abundant as on the 

 pi'eceding anniversary, or at least six times beyond the yearly avei*age. 



New Haven, Conn., Aug. 25, 1841. E. C. Herrick. 



2. American Polythalmia from the Upper Mississippi, and also 

 from the cretaceous formation on the Upper Missouri. — Prof. Bailey, 

 whose microscopical observations on American infusoria are so well 

 known to all our readers, at home and abroad, has recently made an ex- 

 amination of a light cream-colored marl from a mission station on the 

 Upper Mississippi, called there ''prairie chalk.'''' In a letter to the 



