458 UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PUBLICATIONS 



The observers will in general be designated hereafter by their initials 

 and the number of the station will follow, when necessary. 



Plan of the Work. 



The short life and small membership of our society have made it im- 

 possible to carry out the work to date in the ideal way. However, special 

 bulletins, containing general instructions, have been sent out by mail 

 and also published in the Monthly Register of the Society for Practical 

 Astronomy, and prepared blanks for recording meteors have been furnished 

 the members. Much the weakest feature of many of the observations 

 sent in has been the small scale and general unfitness of the maps used for 

 plotting the paths. This has somewhat diminished the accuracy of work 

 which otherwise seemed excellent. However, no dues are charged the 

 members, and no funds, therefore, have been available for printing and 

 distributing proper maps. In spite of this drawback, the results on the 

 whole appear good and will easily measure up to the usual standard of 

 meteor observations. The editors of Popular Astromony and The Monthly 

 Register have always promptly printed any reports or bulletins sent to 

 them, which has greatly aided the work by keeping up interest and gaining 

 new members. 



The plans uniformly followed have been described in full detail in 

 the paper by the author entitled "175 Parabolic Orbits and other Results 

 deduced from over 6200 Meteors" published 1911 in Transactions of 

 American Philosophical Society, N.S., vol. xxii, part 1. It is considered 

 useless to copy here these details of observation and readers are referred 

 to that publication. The present paper is practically a continuation of 

 the one just mentioned and to fully understand the results here given 

 the former paper must have been read. The numbers of the radiants in 

 this, beginning as they do at 177, follow serially the radiants given in that 

 publication, which are frequently referred to. 



One of the chief problems of meteoric astronomy is that of stationary 

 radiants. Many observers seem convinced that such exist in considerable 

 numbers. On the other hand, many astronomers have attacked their 

 results on theoretical grounds, stating such things as stationary radiants 

 are mathematically impossible, except in a few well known cases. Hence 

 this problem is the most important awaiting solution, and only on new 

 and improved data and methods of reduction can we hope for a final 

 conclusion. To hope to get better data, in other words to observe more 



