Some curious information in regard to the shower of meteors which occurred in November last, was obtained by observations made at the National Observatory in Washington. The brighter meteors appeared at a height of seventy-five miles above the earth, and were extinguished at a height of fifty-five miles. The average length of their path was twenty-two miles. During the thickest of the shower, they were counted at the rate of three thousand per hour. Their velocity was forty-four miles per second. The thickness of the stream from north to south, was sixty thousand miles; and it is estimated that there was forty thousand meteors to a lineal mile, or one meteor to every nine hundred cubic miles of space. Prof. Newcomb believes that Tuttle’s comet of 1866, which these November meteors follow, is itself simply an agglomeration of meteroids, just dense enough to be visible in the solar rays; and he thinks that the same is true of the other telescopic comets. The November shower next year will begin at 10 o’clock A.M., Washington time, and will, therefore, only be visible on the Pacific Ocean.
The meteors in question were undoubtedly the Leonids, and apparently in 1867 they were a pretty good show.
Prof. Newcomb is most likely Simon Newcomb, a mathematical astronomer who was a professor at the U.S. Naval Observatory and later became director of the American Nautical Almanac Office. He wrote popular books on astronomy as well as his scholarly works.
This article cites Newcomb as an authoritatve source for the coment/meteor connection, but it was actually Giovanni Schiaparelli who made the connection between the comet and the subsequent meteor showers. Schiaparelli was also the person who first described the caneli of Mars, the mistranslation of which led to the Lowell Observatory and lots of science fiction stories.