17) states that a manuscript is preserved in the library
of Christ's College, Cambridge,** written in the tenth century by a monk,
and entitled 'Ephemerides Rerum Naturalium', in which the natural phenomena
for each day of the year are inscribed as, for instance, the first flowering
of plants, the arrival of birds, etc.; the 10th of August is distinguished
by the word "meteorodes." It was this indication, and the tradition of the
fiery tears of St. Lawrence, that chiefly induced Dr. Forster to undertake
his extremely zealous investigation of the August phenomena. (Quetelet,
'Correspond. Math??m.', S??rie III., t. i., 1837, p. 433.)
[further footnote] **[No such manuscript is at present known to exist in
the library of that college. For this information I am indebted to the
inquiries of Mr. Cory, of Pembroke College, the learned editor of
'Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous', Greek and English, 1840.] -- Tr.
Notwithstanding the great quantity of shooting stars and fire-balls of the
most various dimensions, which, according to Kl??den, were seen to fall at
Potsdam on the night between the 12th and 13th of November, 1822, and on the
same night of the year in 1832 throughout the whole of Europe, from
Portsmouth to Orenburg on the Ural River, and even in the southern
hemisphere, as in the Isle of France, no attention was directed to the
'periodicity' of the phenomenon, and no idea seems to have been entertained
of the connection existing between the fall of shooting stars and the
recurrence of certain days, until the prodigious swarm of shooting stars
which occurred in North America between the 12th and 13th of November, 1833,
and was observed by Olmsted and Palmer.
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