NOVEMBER METEORS. 25 



was of the slightest, and at a segment thereof where the meteoric 

 bodies are least numerous, and thus we must patiently wait till we 

 again dash through it at its densest before we can hope for such a 

 magnificent meteor shower as astonished and delighted us aU in 

 1866. Only at Oxford, as far as our country is concerned, was 

 there anything like a meteor shower on the present occasion, and 

 even there the display seems to have been too faint and uninterest- 

 ing to have attracted much attention. Intelligence has reached our 

 country from New York, however, that over that city, and over the 

 States generally, the meteoric display of the morning of the 14th 

 was very splendid indeed, though, owing to the morning being 

 further advanced before it commenced, less of it was seen by the 

 people at large than on some previous occasions. The weather with 

 our Transatlantic cousins seems to have been all that could be 

 desired, as it is stated that " astronomers and others were able to 

 make very complete observations." The worst thing about our 

 insular position with respect to matters astronomical is the extreme 

 uncertainty with which anything like continuous observation can 

 be conducted. The chances always are twenty to one that in 

 Great Britain, at any given hour in any given place, the weather 

 should be such as to render an observation of a celestial phenomenon 

 impossible, or at the least partial and unsatisfactory. One thing, 

 at least, is now pretty certain — that annually, and at a date that 

 falls somewhere between sunset of the 13th and sunrise of the 14th 

 November, we may confidently look for greater or less displays of 

 these meteoric bodies, the only thing likely to interfere with the 

 interesting pyrotechnic exhibition being an unfavourable state of 

 the weather at a moment when we are most concerned that the sky 

 shall be clear and cloudless. 



Mr. Huggins, whose researches with the spectroscope have already 

 made his name famous, has recently communicated a most interest- 

 ing paper to the Eoyal Society, giving an account of the spectrum 



