“The night was fine; the moon was absent. The meteors were distinguished not only by their enormous multitude, but by their intrinsic magnificence. I shall never forget that night. On the memorable evening, I was engaged in my usual duty at that time of observing nebulæ with Lord Rosse’s great reflecting telescope. I was of course aware that a shower of meteors had been predicted, but nothing that I had heard prepared me for the splendid spectacle so soon to be unfolded. It was about ten o’clock at night when an exclamation from an attendant 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 others 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 nebulæ and ascend to the top of the wall of the great telescope, from whence a clear view of the whole hemisphere of the heavens could be obtained. There, for the next three or four 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. All the tracks of the meteors radiated from Leo. “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.” Soon after the remarkable display of meteors in 1866, Schiaparelli of Milan, whose interest had been aroused by the researches of Newton and Adams, published a paper upon the Perseids, or August meteors, in which he drew attention to the fact that they were moving in the same path as that of the bright comet of 1862, known as Tuttle’s comet. Shortly after this Leverrier published his orbit of the Leonid meteors derived from the observed position of the radiant (within the sickle-shaped group of stars in Leo), in connection with the periodic time assigned by Adams; and almost simultaneously, but without any idea of a connection between them, Oppolzer published his orbit of Tempel’s comet of 1866, and the two orbits were at once seen to be practically identical.