[footnote] *From a letter to myself, dated Jan. 24th, 1838. The enormous swarm of falling stars in November, 1799, was almost exclusively seen in America, where it was witnessed from New Herrnhut in Greenland to the equator. The swarms of 1831 and 1832 were visible only in Europe, and those of 1833 and 1834 only in the United States of North America. If the hypothesis of a regular progression or oscillation of the nodes should acquire greater weight, special interest will be attached to the investigation of older observations. The Chinese annals, in which great falls of shooting stars, as well as the phenomena of comets, are recorded, go back beyond the age of Tyrtæs, or the second Messenian war. They give a description of two streams in the month of March, one of which is 687 years anterior to the Christian era. Edward Biot has observed that among the fifty-two phenomena which he has collected from the Chinese annals, those that were of most frequent recurrence are recorded at periods nearly corresponding with the 20th and 22d of July, O.S., and might consequently be identical with the stream of St. Lawrence's day, taking into account that it has advanced since the epochs* indicated. [footnote] *Lettre de M. Edouard Biot à M. Quetelet, sur les anciennes apparitions d'Etoiles Filantes en Chine, in the 'Bull. de l'Académie de Bruxelles', 1843, t. x., No. 7, p. 8. On the notice from the 'Chronicon Ecclesiæ Pragensis', see the younger Boguslawski, in Poggend., 'Annalen', bd. xlviii., s. 612. If the fall of shooting stars of the 21st of October, 1366, O.S. (a notice of which was found by the younger Von Boguslawski, in Benessius de Horowic's 'Chronicon Ecclesiæ Pragensis'), be identical with our November phenomenon, although the occurrence in the fourteenth century was seen in broad daylight, we find by the precession in 477 years that this system of meteors, or, rather, its common center of gravity, must describe p 129 a retrograde orbit round the Sun. It also follows, from the views thus developed, that the non-appearance, during certain years, in any portion of the Earth, of the two streams hitherto observed in November and about the time of St. Lawrence's day, must be ascribed either to an interruption in the meteoric ring, that is to say, to intervals occurring between the asteroid groups, or, according to Poisson to the action of the larger planets* on the form and position of this annulus.