390 Probable Connection of Comets with Shooting Stars. 



of the most conspicuous lunar tints could be settled by the 

 agreement of a moderate number of good observers, a foun- 

 dation would be laid for further work. 



If the plan of transparent disks should be preferred to that 

 of tints painted on paper, viewed by reflected light, a small v 

 lamp should be agreed upon as the source of light. Perhaps 

 the benzoline lamps recently introduced from France would 

 answer, or camphine, or the fluid called photogene might do. 

 Paraffine, as usually burnt, is too yellow, but selecting a fluid, 

 and a mode of burning it which gives an approximately white 

 light, and furnishing the lamp with a bluish tinted glass, 

 would ensure the absence of any disturbing colour; and if 

 appropriate lamps were made cheap, and sold in conformity 

 with a recognized standard, they would be generally used in 

 observatories, and help to secure a uniformity of result. 



Our object now is merely to start an idea. If lunar 

 observers think proper to support it, the method of carrying 

 it out will soon be found. Perhaps, instead of reflecting the 

 light of a lamp from white paper, the best way would be to 

 transmit it through the disks of ground glass, recommended 

 by Mr. Slack to microscopists in our last number; but these, if 

 used, must be made all alike. 



PROBABLE CONNECTION OP COMETS WITH 

 SHOOTING STARS. 



BY W. T. LYNN, B.A., F.R.A.S., 

 Of the Eoyal Observatory, Greenwich. 



Professor Adams, at a recent meeting of the Royal Astronomical 

 Society, completely established as a fact, what had been previ- 

 ously suspected by an Italian astronomer, named Schiaparelli, 

 of Milan, that the shower of meteors, which is occasionally and 

 at certain intervals witnessed in the month of November, moves 

 round the sun in an orbit almost identical with that of a comet 

 observed early last year (Comet L, 1866),* which performs a revo- 

 lution in little more than 33 years. It has also been shown to be 

 highly probable that the August meteors may be identified with 

 a comet seen in 1862, and the April meteors with a comet dis- 

 covered at New York in the spring of 1861. The conjecture 

 naturally suggests itself that the comets in question compose in 

 fact a kind of congeries, or assemblage of meteors, moving 

 within small distances of each other, which, at a considerable 

 distance, present the appearance of single bodies. 



* Discovered by Tempcl at Marseilles in 1865, December 19. It was a very 

 faint telescopic comet, and destitute of tail. 



