423 
never did rain fall much, thicker than the meteors fell towards 
the earth; east, west, north, and south, it was the same." 
Notwithstanding, says Humboldt, the great quantity of fall- 
ing stars and fire-balls of the most various dimensions which 
were seen to fall at Potsdam on the night of the 12th and 
13th November, 1822, and on the same night of the year 1832, 
throughout the whole of Europe from Portsmouth to Oren- 
buig on the Ural river, and even in the Southern hemi- 
sphere at the Isle of France, no one seemed to remark the 
coincidence of so many of these displays happening on the 
same day of the month. Olmsted and Palmer were the two 
puncipal scientific men who described the great meteoric 
shower of 1833 in America. The latter, calling to mind that 
the date of the shower described by Humboldt and* Ellicott 
in 1799, was the 13th of November, first suspected the perio- 
dicity of these showers, — a fact fully confirmed by a histori- 
cal investigation into the dates of extraordinary showers of 
meteors. 
On the 9th ana 10th of November, 1787, many falling stars 
were observed at Manheim, in southern Germany. Besides the 
manifestations already mentioned on the 13th November in the 
years 1799, 1822, 1832 and 1833, on the same day of the month 
m 1831, at four o'clock in the morning, a great shower of falling 
stars was seen by Captain Berard on the Spanish coast near 
Garthagena. On the same date in 1834 a similar shower 
thou gn not so great as that of 1833, was seen. Olmsted was 
the first to remark that nearly all the falling stars on the 13th 
of November, 1833, seemed to radiate from one point in the 
heavens, namely near the star y in the constellation Leo. The 
point of radiation did not change, but followed the apparent 
height and azimuth of the star during the continuance of the 
shower. This remarkable fact has been confirmed by obser- 
vation of all the showers witnessed on this date since 1 833. Ac- 
cording to Enke's computation, this radiant point in space 
marks the direction in which the earth was moving on the 
13th of November in its annual course round the sun. 
The periodical appearance of falling stars on the same day 
of the year, all radiating from a point in the direction of the 
earth s motion, led Humboldt to conjecture that at that parti- 
cular period the earth was passing through a ring or belt of 
minute planetary bodies, which were then drawn within the 
sphere of the earth's attraction, — a conjecture since pretty 
generally adopted. He also conjectured that there was, owino- 
to the earth’s or other planetary disturbance, a gradual retar- 
dation of the November phenomenon, owing to the change of 
the points where the ring of meteoric bodies intersected the 
earth s course. He sought for records of falling stars in an- 
