34 
As I had the good fortune to witness the great meteoric 
shower which occurred on the morning of the 13th Nov., 
1833, I may state that the late display was far inferior to it 
both in the number of meteors seen and in the brilliancy of 
the larger ones, and I am therefore inclined to think that a 
much finer display may be expected to occur in November 
next. At the time of the 1833 great shower I was at sea, 
off the west coast of central America, and although I then 
knew little about meteors, and the idea of a radiant point 
had not, so far as I am aware, ever occurred to any astrono- 
mer or meteorologist, the tendency of the great majority of 
the meteors to diverge from a particular region of the 
heavens was so strongly marked that it at once engaged my 
attention, and I find on referring to my notes that I fixed 
the central point of this region in the constellation Cancer, 
a few degrees east of the stars 3 and y, and not in Leo, as 
observed by Professor Olmstead and others, in the north- 
western portion of the North American continent. A great 
number of the meteors, however, had other radiant points, 
and some of the finest moved in long horizontal arcs, or in 
directions nearly perpendicular to that of the main stream. 
This fact seems to me to be strongly opposed to the cosmi- 
cal theory of meteorites, except on the rather improbable 
supposition that the earth, on that occasion, encountered 
two or more groups, all, at the same time, crossing each 
others orbits, as well as the orbit of the earth. It may, 
however, be urged that such a supposition is hardly more 
unlikely than that which ascribes the November meteors to 
a ring of small bodies moving round the sun in an orbit 
differing little in magnitude from the earth’s orbit, but the 
motion being retrograde, or contrary to that of the earth, and 
therefore inconsistent with the general analogies of the solar 
system, and opposed to Laplace’s almost universally received 
nebular hypothesis. 
