Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/465

Rh shower seems first to have fixed the attention of scientific men upon the subject. But he contributed still more to the advance of our knowledge by the success with which he insisted that nearly all such phenomena are periodic, and that therefore there is reason to hope that the causes of them are discoverable. Shortly after, the periodic character of the August meteors was established; and when the next return of the November meteors to the earth took place, when there was a magnificent display of them exhibited to Europe in 1832, and a still more impressive spectacle seen in America in the following year, the attention of scientific men was thoroughly aroused.

In England meteors began to be systematically observed, and in this way all that knowledge about them has been acquired which was referred to in the beginning of the lecture. In France the records of antiquity and the annals of distant nations were ransacked; and by this most useful antiquarian search, no less than ten visits of the November swarm, previous to the shower observed by Humboldt in 1799, have been brought to light. But the first great step toward gaining a knowledge of their orbit was made by Professor H. Newton, of New Haven, in America, who published in 1864 two memoirs, in which he discussed all the accounts that had been collected, extending back to the year A.D. 902. He found, by comparing the dates of the old observations with the modern ones, that the phenomenon is one which recurs three times in a century, or, more exactly, that the middle of the swarm crosses the earth's path at intervals of thirty-three and a quarter years. He further showed that meteors which thus visit the earth three times in a century must be moving in one or other of five orbits which he described; and that therefore, if means could be found for deciding between these five orbits, the problem would be solved. The five possible orbits are—the great oval orbit which we now know the meteors actually do traverse every thirty-three and a quarter years; a nearly circulat orbit, very little larger than the earth's orbit, which they would move round in a few days more than a year; another similar orbit in which their periodic time would be a few days short of a year; and two other small oval orbits lying within the earth's orbit. But we owe even more to Professor Newton. He also pointed out how it was possible to ascertain which of these orbits is the true one, although the test he indicated was one so difficult of application that there was at the time little hope that any astronomer would attempt it. Fortunately, our own Professor Adams, of Cambridge, was found able to grapple with the difficulties of the problem, and willing to encounter its immense labor, and to him we owe the completion of this great discovery.

A comparison of the dates of the successive showers which have been recorded shows that the point where the path of the meteors crosses the earth's orbit is not fixed, but that every time the meteors come round they strike the earth's orbit at a point which is