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The orbital motion of a cloud or stream of small particles was indicated. The period favoured by H. A. Newton was 354-1/2 days; another suggestion was 375-1/2 days, and another 33-1/4 years. He noticed that the advance of the date of the shower between 902 and 1833, at the rate of one day in seventy years, meant a progression of the node of the orbit.

The travellers found themselves now in a night that had plenty of time not only to become black itself, but to steep everything connected with it in palpable blackness. This was the night 354-1/4 hours long, during which the invisible face of the Moon is turned away from the Sun. In this black darkness the Projectile now fully participated.

The movement of rotation is the one that causes night and day on the surface of the moon, only there is but one day and one night in a lunar month, and they each last 354-1/3 hours. But, happily, the face, turned towards the terrestrial globe, is lighted by it with an intensity equal to the light of fourteen moons.

Professor Newton himself gave the preference to the shortest of 354-1/2 days, but indicated the means of deciding with certainty upon the true one. It was furnished by the advancing motion of the node, or that day's delay of the November shower every seventy years, which the old chronicles had supplied data for detecting.