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sporadic meteors of nightly occurrence are but outlying stragglers of a number 
of meteoroid streams, and the leading problem of meteor science to-day is to 
find these streams and their attendant comets. Professor Newton says the known 
comets have been apparently growing smaller with their successive returns. 
Halley’s comet was much brighter in its earlier than its later recurrences. Biela’s 
comet has divided into two, if not more, parts, and has perhaps gone altogether 
to pieces, as it could not be found in 1872 where it should have appeared. The 
question naturally arises what causes a comet to break up. This is as yet only a 
matter of speculation, but this much is known that comets surely come from 
stellar space in whose unimaginable degree of cold a condensing mass furnished 
heat for the making of a meteoroid. In cooling, or by some inteynal convulsion . 
the mass may break and enter the solar system either as a mass of pebbles or as 
one huge body. Nearing the sun new and strong forces act on it. The same 
heat and repulsion that develop and drive off from acomet in one direction a tail 
100,000,000 miles long may have worked off and scattered in another direction 
solid fragments to wander in their own orbit around the sun, an infinitesimal 
comet for millions of years—till entering the earth’s atmosphere one by one they 
crash through it either to fall on the ground or to be annihilated by friction before 
reaching it. 
Professor Schiaparelli an Italian authority on these questions regards 
meteoroids as original inmates or portions of one of what he styles star drifts, 
and of whose existence decided proofs are given by Proctor, and composing with 
other stars of the same vast eddy attendant bodies accompanying in its journey 
through space the general drift or star family of which the sun forms part. On 
this assumption they are bodies from some more distant space than the star family 
of the sun, wanderers from more distant star drifts, 
The conflagration of a star through contact with weteoroid bodies is not 
an unknown occurrence. The first on record took place 2000 years ago, and is 
described by Hipparchus. It was seen blazing in full daylight. Similar events 
are recorded in 945, in 1264, and in 1572. In 1596 Fabricius observed a 
similar occurrence, followed by another in 1604. In 1673 another made its 
appearance, remaining visible for two years, whilst as recently as 1848 a similar 
event was noticed, and a few, years ago, the latest on record, another appeared 
which was ably written upon by Proctor in an article of hisin Belgravia. In 1869 
- two meteoric masses are recorded as having fallen into our sun, affecting the 
whole frame of the earth. Vivid auroras were seen where they had never before 
been seen, accompanied by electro-magnetic disturbances all over the world. In 
many parts the telegraph lines refused to work, signal men received many shocks, 
and at Boston and elsewhere a flame of fire followed the pen of Bain’s telegraph. 
This was the effect of two comparatively small meteors. What would be the 
effect of a comet, bearing in its flight many millions of these falling into the sun 
can be understood. It would be only temporary, but no student of science 
would be left to record it. Proctor reassures us by saying that all but one of the 
known star conflagrations have occurred in the zone of the milky way, and that 
one in a region connected with the milky way by a stream of stars, and if among 
the comets in attendance on our sun there is one whose orbit intersects the sun’s 
globe, it must already have struck it before the era of man. 
An interesting question has quite recently been put forward by the Lancet the 
well known English medical publication, respecting the possible influence of me- 
teoric matter on the animal life of the earth. Professor Herschell has sueceeded 
im examining and analysing by means of the spectroscope, the light of seventeen 
of these bodies, and he has succeeded in detecting the well known yellow bands 
produced by sodiuin incombustion. “It is strange,” says the Lancet, “to consider 
