1 72 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



scattered one-inch meteors would be in or very near the 

 same line of view, they would hide from view a space 

 equal to 100,000,000 circle-miles, or a space equal 

 to that which would be hidden by a planet 10,000 

 miles in diameter, close to the sun. This would suffice 

 to cut off about a 7,000th part of his light and heat. 



Now from the known wealth and extent of such 

 systems as the August and November meteor streams 

 (the latter of which follows in the train of a comet so 

 small as to require a telescope to make it visible), and 

 the enormous probability that others far richer exist 

 in the space between the sun and the earth's orbit, we 

 might safely infer that there are in the sun's neighbour- 

 hood many meteoric systems far richer than the one 

 we have conceived above. Again, every system of 

 meteors circling around the sun aggregates as its 

 members approach the sun, and segregates as they 

 recedfc from him, so that we may readily believe in a 

 far greater wealth of meteoric distribution in a flight 

 of meteors passing its perihelion, than the above 

 suppositions involve. Yet, again, if we take into 

 account the minute but more numerous components of 

 a meteoric stream, we should have to admit a far more 

 effective interruption of the sun's light than we have 

 considered above. For instance, if we suppose that 

 besides a meteor one-inch in diameter in the space of 

 five cubic miles there were a million tiny bodies whose 

 combined mass would only make up such another 

 one-inch meteor, we should have to assign to these 

 million tiny bodies, not the same light-obstructive 



