Crossword-Solution: LEONIDS 7 letters, 8 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

The great train of the November meteors, known as the Leonids, which at regular periods of thirty-three years had in the past encountered the earth's atmosphere, was due, and over-due.

The majority, too, were true Leonids, issuing from the radiant point in the "Sickle," but these were not more numerous than may be counted on that night in any year, and served to emphasise the fact that no real display was in progress.

Train after train, each with its full complement of passengers, flashed forth across that summer sky, till the people in the Observatories must have thought they had miscalculated strangely and the Earth was passing amid the showering Leonids before her appointed time.

Then, in January 1867, Le Verrier gave the elements of the November meteor shower (Leonids); and Peters, of Altona, identified these with Oppolzer’s elements for Tempel’s comet 1866—Schiaparelli having independently attained both of these results.

His earliest memory is that of the "Falling Stars," the most brilliant display, perhaps, of the Leonids ever recorded, that of November 12-13, 1833, which establishes his age as being in excess of 103 years.