XViil President's Address 
till after two o’olock on the morning of the 14th the heavens 
were alive with arain of fire. I before mentioned that these 
rings revolve in an opposite direction to the earth, con- - 
sequently, she met the meteors in ‘full tilt. The earth 
moving at the rate of 1,000 miles a minute, meets them coming 
towards her at the same rate at first, but long before they come 
into view attaining a speed of 1,200 miles a minute. They 
all appeared to come from one point in the sky, a point in 
the constellation Leo, and as some writers state, “at times 
appeared to belt the sky like meridians on a terrestrial 
clobe.” ve 
The occasion of the November shower must, therefore, be 
attributed to the earth’s meeting the dense portion of the 
November ring exactly as it was rising through the plane of 
the ecliptic, and from what I have already mentioned, it ap- 
pears that a similar phenomenon will not occur again to any 
part of the earth’s surface till 1899. Mr. Alexander © 
Herschell, one of the highest authorities on this subject, 
gives, as the result of his observations and deductions of the 
meteor-fall of August, the weights and spectrum analyses of 
many of these bodies. Some, he says, do not exceed two 
grains, and not one in twenty exceeds a pound in weight, 
It seems almost impossible that a particle only weighing 
two grains should, at a distance of from fifty-four to 
seventy-four miles, which is ascertained to be the distances at 
which these bodies first become visible to us, be capable of 
producing the brilliant effects presented; but it must be 
borne in mind the immense velocity they have, and that 
this velocity becomes converted into heat when checked by 
resistance. Asingle grain of matter moving thirty miles 
per second represents a dynamical energy of 55°675 foot 
pounds ; this energy becomes converted into heat imme- 
diately the meteoric particle enters our atmosphere, of suti- 
cient intensity to produce the luminous appearance with 
