Page:The story of the comets.djvu/251

XIII. Postponing for the moment Adams's conclusions we will pass on to some researches carried out on kindred lines by Schiaparelli of Milan. He took in hand the Perseid meteors of August as he found them recorded on Aug. 9, 10, 11, 1866; and treating them also as a concrete mass and assuming, as

Fig. 103.

Adams had done, that their orbit was a section of a cone, he arrived at certain figures on the supposition that the conic section in question was a parabola. He had reached this stage in his researches when he suddenly discovered that his parabolic elements of the meteor group very closely resembled the elliptic elements which had been obtained for the Comet