468 TJNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PUBLICATIONS 



General Statement as to Results. 



The results depend upon 2800 ± meteors. Of these perhaps 70 per 

 cent were actually plotted. More or less complete descriptions are avail- 

 able for about 400+ more. The remainder are only useful to determine 

 the hourly rates. Careful study showed that 126 radiants had been prob- 

 ably fixed with enough accuracy to justify the computation of parabolic 

 orbits. These are contained in table II, and form far the most valuable 

 results. Table III contains 22 radiants of whose existence or position there 

 was still some uncertainty. The remaining tables contain other infor- 

 mation of interest, each table having a few words of explanation attached 

 to it. Brief sections are devoted to certain meteor streams of special 

 interest. 



While all the labor of preparing this paper, including the computation 

 of the orbits etc., has fallen upon the author, it must be clearly under- 

 stood that its very existance has only been made possible by the enthusiastic 

 and unselfish cooperation of all the other observers. Each one of these 

 has spent many hours of hard work gathering the data and making the 

 ' observations, and every possible acknowledgement is due to each one. 



One further acknowledgement should be made to Dr. F. H. Gaines, 

 President of Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Ga., by whose enlightened 

 policy time was allowed me to prepare this rather laborious paper, through 

 the removal of many of the usual extra duties imposed upon a college 

 professor, while the author was connected with that institution. 



CONNECTION BETWEEN HALLEY's COMET AND THE 7J AQUARIDS. 



Certainly as early as 1868 some guesses were made that the meteors 

 which appeared late in April and early in May might be connected with 

 Halley's Comet. The first paper on the subject which could be found 

 was by Rudolf Falb, -vvritten in 1868, and published in A.N. 72, p. 361-5. 

 That his conclusions were totally erroneous, so far as proved by his data, 

 was at once shown by Dr. Edmond Weiss in A.N. 73, p. 41-2. The latter 

 found no such connection. The next attempt to prove this connection 

 was made in 1876 by Prof. A. S. Herschel in M.N. vol. 36, p. 222. But the 

 theoretical radiant is no less than 15° distant from the only observed 

 radiant he gives, which of course was no proof at all, but rather a positive 

 disproof, so far as his data went. He followed this up in May, 1878 

 by another paper in M.N, vol. 38, p. 379, in which he gives much more 

 data, but still cannot get a closer agreement than 11°, a discordance 

 out of all bounds. It can hardly be claimed therefore that his work 



