398 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. 



ber 6. Mr. W. E. Brooks, of New York, saw a detached 

 fragment of the comet which afterwards faded out of view. 

 Professor Schmidt observed another and similar fragment 

 which has likewise disappeared. 



All these observations indicate disruption due to some 

 disturbing force, acting with different degrees of violence 

 upon different portions of the comet. 



Minor disturbances of this kind will, I think, account 

 for the trail of meteoric bodies which Schiaparelli has 

 shown to follow the paths of other comets. A great dis- 

 turbance might give quite a new orbit to the meteoric 

 fragments. 



These considerations suggest another and a curious view 

 of the question of possible cometary collision with the sun, 

 viz., that a comet might be traveling in such an orbit as to 

 make it mathematically due to plunge obliquely beneath the 

 solar surface at its next perihelion; but on its approach to 

 the surface of the sun it might encounter so violent an out- 

 rush of solar-prominence matter as to drive it bodily 

 out of its course, and avert the threatened peril to its 

 existence. 



THE ORIGIN OF COMETS. 



WE read in story-books of uncomfortable people who 

 have cherished a guilty secret in their bosoms, that it has 

 "gnawed their vitals," until at last they have carried it 

 to the grave. I have such a secret that does the gnawing 

 business whenever I write or speak of comets, concerning 

 the origin of which I am guilty of an hypothesis that has 

 hitherto been cherished as aforesaid from the very shame of 

 adding another to an already exaggerated heap of specula- 

 tions on celestial physics. 



It assumes, in the first place, that all the other suns 

 Avhich we see as stars are constituted like our own sun; 

 that they eject great eruptions similar to the prominences 

 above described, and even of vastly greater magnitude, as in 

 the case of the flashing stars that have excited so much 



