tendant by my side made me look up from the telescope, just in time to
see a fine meteor dash across the sky. It was presently followed by
another, and then again by more in twos and in threes, which showed that
the prediction of a great shower was likely to be verified. At this time
the Earl of Rosse (then Lord Oxmantown) joined me at the telescope, and,
after a brief interval, we decided to cease our observations of the
nebulae and ascend to the top of the wall of the great telescope (Fig. 7,
p. 18), whence a clear view of the whole hemisphere of the heavens could
be obtained. There, for the next two or three hours, we witnessed a
spectacle which can never fade from my memory. The shooting stars
gradually increased in number until sometimes several were seen at once.
Sometimes they swept over our heads, sometimes to the right, sometimes
to the left, but they all diverged from the east. As the night wore on,
the constellation Leo ascended above the horizon, and then the
remarkable character of the shower was disclosed. All the tracks of the
meteors radiated from Leo. (_See_ Fig. 74, p. 368.) Sometimes a meteor
appeared to come almost directly towards us, and then its path was so
foreshortened that it had hardly any appreciable length, and looked like
an ordinary fixed star swelling into brilliancy and then as rapidly
vanishing. Occasionally luminous trains would linger on for many minutes
after the meteor had flashed across, but the great majority of the
trains in this shower were evanescent. It would be impossible to say how
many thousands of meteors were seen, each one of which was bright enough
to have elicited a note of admiration on any ordinary night.

The adjoining figure (Fig. 77) shows the remarkable manner in which the
shooting stars of this shower diverged from a point. It is not to be
supposed that all these objects were in view at the same moment. The
observer of a shower is provided with a map of that part of the heavens
in which the shooting stars appear. He then fixes his attention on one
particular shooting star, and observes carefully its track with respect
to the fixed stars in its vicinity. He then draws a line upon his map
in the direction in which the shooting star moved. Repeating the same
observation for several other shooting stars belonging to the shower,
his map will hardly fail to show that their different tracks almost all
tend from one point or region of the figure. There are, it is true, a