80 « 
so this result ought scarcely to be allowed to invalidate Pastetir’s 
conclusions, of which, I may add, he is as confident as ever. 
Astronomers have not been idle ; they have discovered eight new 
planets and some six new, or at any rate unrecorded, comets 
during the past year. But the great event was, of course, the 
discovery of the new bright star in the Nebula of Andromeda. As 
our telescopes increase in power and sharpness of definition, so 
more and more of the supposed Nebule are desolved into separate 
stars or suns, until some authorities are disposed to doubt whether 
any really nebulous matter exists within our ken. 
In America they are making a magnificent telescope for the Lick 
Observatory, on Mount Hamilton, with a flint glass dise of thirty- 
eight inches diameter, which ought to make the moon, which is 
240,000 miles distant, appear as if only one hundred miles away, 
and should render visible any object on its surface of the same size 
as many of our public buildings. The meteor shower of the 17th 
November last was perhaps the most brilliant and remarkable one 
is likely to witness im a lifetime, the meteors fell at the rate of fifty 
or sixty a minute, and about 7 p.m, almost resembled a display of 
rockets, as many as five or six being visible simultaneously ; as a 
countryman quaintly remarked “ Yer couldn’t look at a star but 
what it run away’’! In the north of London they were seen to fall 
at the rate of 5,000 an hour. Everyone, nowadays, knows there 
are zones of small solid bodies, tiny worlds in miniature, revolving 
round the sun in ecliptical orbits, and that these small spheres, 
travelling at the rate of 1,200 miles a minute, become ignited from 
the rapid friction in passing through the earth’s atmosphere. As 
the iron and nickel of which meteorites are composed is found to 
exist in the same combination in certain voleanic products, it has 
been surmised by some that meteors may possibly be the fragments 
of an exploded planet. 
Photography has again recently been lending important aid to 
Astronomy by recording the actual movements of the so-called 
« Fixed ” Stars, and showing the direction of their course through 
the heavens. So far from being fixed, we know these stars to be 
whirling through space with a velocity in comparison with which 
the rush of our earth round the sun, or the enormously rapid 
movement of that great centre in its own mighty course, is only a8 
the slow crawl of a tortoise. Whither, and through what in- 
conceivably vast empyrean are all heavenly bodies hurrying ? Shall 
we, can we ever know ? 
You will be gratified to learn that a French Savant, M. Mortillet, 
has discovered the celebrated ‘‘ Missing link,” so long and hitherto 
vainly sought. In the Miocene Strata he has found (so he says) 
the fossil common progenitor of man and monkey, and he produces 
