er looked for November 23, 1899,
did not fall, and no further display from this quarter is probable until
November 17, 1905, although one is possible a year earlier.[1235]

The Leonids, through the adverse influence of Jupiter and Saturn,
inflicted upon multitudes of eager watchers a still more poignant
disappointment. A dense part of the swarm, having nearly completed a
revolution since 1866, should, travelling normally, have met the earth
November 15, 1899; in point of fact, it swerved sunward, and the
millions of meteorites which would otherwise have been sacrificed for
the illumination of our skies escaped a fiery doom. The contingency had
been forecast in the able calculations of Dr. Johnstone Stoney and Dr.
A. M. W. Downing,[1236] superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office;
but the verification scarcely compensated the failure. Nor was the
situation retrieved in the following years. Only ragged fringes of the
great tempest-cloud here and there touched our globe. As the same
investigators warned us to expect, the course of the meteorites had been
not only rendered sinuous by perturbation, but also broken and
irregular. We can no longer count upon the Leonids. Their glory, for
scenic purposes, is departed. The comet associated with them also evaded
observation. Although it doubtless kept its tryst with the sun in the
spring of 1899, the attendant circumstances were too unfavourable to
allow it to be seen from the earth.[1237] By an almost fantastic
coincidence, nevertheless, a faint comet was photographed, November 14,
1898,[1238] by Dr. Chase, of the Yale College Observatory, close to the
Leonid radiant, whither a "meteorograph" was directed with a view to
recording trails left by precursors of the main Leonid body. A promising
start, too, was made on the same occasion with meteoric researches from
sensitive plates.[1239] Indeed, Schaeberle and Colton[1240] had already,
in 1896, determined the height of a Leonid by means of photographs taken
at stations on different ridges of Mount Hamilton; and Professor
Pickering has prosecuted similar work at Harvard, with encouraging
results. Everything in this branch of science depends upon how far they
can be carried. Without the meteorograph, rigid accuracy in the
observation of shooting stars is unattainable, and rigid accuracy is the
_sine qua non_ for obtaining exact knowledge.

Biela does not offer the only example of cometary disruption. Setting
aside the unauthenti