Notwithstanding the great quantity of shooting stars and fire-balls of the most various dimensions, which, according to Klöden, 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. The stars fell on this occasion, like flakes of snow, and it was calculated that at least 240,000 had fallen during a period of nine hours. Palmer, of New Haven, Connecticut, was led, in consequence of this splendid phenomenon, to the recollection of the fall of meteoric stones in 1799, first described by Ellicot and myself,* and which, by p 125 a comparison of the facts I had adduced, showed that the phenomenon had been simultaneously seen in the New Continent, from the equator to New Herrnhut in Greenland (65 degrees 14' north latitude), and between 46 degrees and 82 degrees longitude. [footnote] *Humb., 'Rel. Hist.', t. i., p. 519-527. Ellicot in the 'Transactions of the American Society', 1804, vol. vi., . 29. Arago makes the following observations in reference to the November phenomena: "We thus become more and more confirmed in the belief that there exists a zone composed of millions of small bodies, whose orbits cut the plane of the ecliptic at about the point which out Earth annually occupies between the 11th and 13th of November. It is a new planetary world beginning to be revealed to us." ('Annuaire', 1836, p. 296.) The identity of the epochs was recognized with astonishment. The stream which had been seen from Jamaica to Boston (40 degrees 21' north latitude) to traverse the whole vault of heaven on the 12th and 13th of November, 1833, was again observed in the United States in 1834, on the night between the 13th and 14th of November, although on this latter occasion it showed itself with somewhat less intensity. In Europe the periodicity of the phenomenon has since been manifested with great regularity. Another and a like regularly recurring phenomenon is that noticed in the month of August, the meteoric stream of St. Lawrence, appearing between the 9th and 14th of August. Muschenbrock,* as early as in the middle of the last century, drew attention to the frequency of meteors in the month of August' but their certain periodic return about the time of St. Lawrence's day was first shown by Quetelet, Olbers, and Benzenberg.