THE STORY OF THE NOVEMBER METEORS. 453 



in possession of this link if our ancestors had made sufficiently full 

 observations ; and our posterity will have it when they compare the 

 observations they can make with those which we are now carefully 

 placing on record for their use. They will then know whether the 

 rate at which the stream is lengthening out is such as to indicate that 

 a. d. 126 was the year in which this process began. If so, Le Ver- 

 rier's hypothesis will be fully proved. 



Another episode in the eventful history of these meteors is also 

 known with considerable probability. It has been already mentioned 

 that a comet is traveling along the same path as the meteors. It is 

 moving a very little slower than they, and is at present just at the 

 head of the procession which they make through space. Another 

 comet is similarly moving in the track of the great elliptic ring of 

 August meteors. In 1867 the lecturer ventured to suggest an im- 

 portant function which these comets seem to have discharged. Picture 

 to yourselves a mass of gas before it became connected with the solar 

 system, traveling through space at a distance from the sun or any 

 other star. Meteors would now and then pass in various directions, 

 and with various velocities, through its substance. For the most part 

 they would go entirely through and pass out again ; but in every such 

 case the meteor would leave the comet with less velocity than it had 

 when approaching it. And in some cases this reduced velocity would 

 be such that the future path of the meteor would be an ellipse round 

 the comet. Whenever this was once brought to pass, the meteor 

 would inevitably return again and again to the comet, each time pass- 

 ing through some part of its substance, and at every passage losing 

 speed. After each loss of speed the ellipse it would next proceed to 

 describe would be smaller than the one before, until at last the meteor 

 would sink entirely into the gas and be ingulfed by it. In this way 

 meteor after meteor would settle down through the comet, and, in the 

 end, just such a cluster would be formed as came across the planet 

 Uranus in the year 126, or, if such a cluster existed originally within 

 the mass of gas, it would in this way be augmented. As the comet 

 swept past the planet, its outlying parts would seem to have grazed 

 his surface, and in this way the gas was probably somewhat more re- 

 tarded than the meteors ; and in the centuries which have since elapsed 

 the meteors have gone so much ahead of the comet that they are now 

 treading on his heels and on the point of overtaking him, while prob- 

 ably the gas has again brought together a smaller cluster of the 

 meteors. 



The question now arises, How the deserts of space which extend 

 from star to star come to be tenanted here and there by a patch of 

 gas or an occasional meteorite ? Light has been thrown on this in- 

 quiry by discoveries made with the spectroscope in modern times and 

 by observations during eclipses. These have revealed to us the fact 

 that violent outbursts occur upon the sun, and doubtless on other 



