Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/62

38 applied usually to the discovery that a pet theory will not work. But sometimes it presents one with an unexpected find. This is what it did here.

It is an interesting fact of observation that more meteors are visible at six o'clock in the morning than at six o'clock at night in the proportion of 3 to 1. This

seeming preference for early rising is due to no matutinality on the part of the meteors, but to the matin aspect then presented by the Earth combined with its orbital motion round the Sun. For at six in the morning the observer stands on the advancing side of the Earth, at the bow of the airship; at six at night he is at the stern. He, therefore, runs into the meteors at sunrise and slips away from them at sunset. He is pelted in the morning in consequence. Just as a pedestrian facing a storm gets wetter in front than behind.

So far the books. Now let us examine this quantitatively according to the direction in which the meteors