1 58 THE BORDERLAND OF SCIENCE. 



condition of our system, and the condition to which it 

 is tending, may be thence ascertained. 



I do not purpose here to trace out the progress of 

 those labours by which our present knowledge of the 

 nature of meteors and of the part they play in the 

 economy of the solar system has been gained. The 

 history of those researches is full of interest, not only 

 on account of the strangeness of the facts to which 

 astronomers have been led, but also on account of the 

 singular coincidences which have marked the progress 

 of inquiry. At one time, it is a great display of 

 shooting-stars which takes place just as astronomers 

 required special information respecting meteoric 

 showers ; at another, a bright comet the only comet 

 of the 650 hitherto detected which could give certain 

 information appears at the very time when the infor- 

 mation was needed ; and at yet another, precisely when 

 astronomers were inquiring about another comet 

 supposed to have escaped detection (if it had, indeed, 

 any real existence), they find that that very comet had 

 been seen, its path calculated, and even its constitution 

 determined, only a few months before. Such coinci- 

 dences as these, the assiduity displayed by Adams, 

 Leverrier, and their fellow-workers, and the singular 

 conclusions to which their labours point, undoubtedly 

 cause the account of the last few years of meteoric 

 research to form one of the most interesting chapters 

 in the history of astronomy. But the narrative of 

 these matters has been given elsewhere, and is doubtless 

 already familiar to most of those who will read these 



