THE ORIGIN OF COMETS. 399 



wonderment among astronomers, but which I regard simply 

 as suns like ours, subject, like ours, to periodic maximum 

 and minimum activities, but of greater magnitude. 



If such is the case, some of the prominence matter or 

 vaporous constituents of these suns must be ejected with 

 much greater proportional violence than are those from our 

 sun. But those from our sun have been proved to rush out 

 on some occasions with a velocity so great that the solar 

 gravitation cannot bring them back. If such is ever the 

 case with the explosions of our sun, it must be of frequent 

 occurrence with the greater explosions of certain stars, and 

 therefore vast quantities of meteoric matter are continually 

 ejected into space, and traveling there until they come 

 within the gravitation domain of some other sun like ours, 

 when they will necessarily be bent into such orbits as those 

 of comets. 



But what will be the nature of this meteoric matter ? 



If from our sun, it would be a multitude of metallic 

 hailstones, due to the condensation of the metallic vapor 

 by cooling as it leaves the sun, and such meteoric hail 

 would correspond to the meteoric stones that fall upon our 

 earth, and which, for reasons stated in " The Fuel of the 

 Sun," I believe to be of solar origin. Besides these, there 

 would be ice-hail, such as Schevedorf claims to be meteoric. 



A star mainly composed of hydrogen and carbon, or 

 densely enveloped in these gases (as the spectroscope indi- 

 cates to be the case in some of these flashing stars), would 

 eject hydrocarbon vapors, condensible by cooling into 

 solids similar to those we obtain by the condensation of 

 terrestrial hydrocarbon vapors (paraffin, camphor, turpen- 

 tine, and all the essential oils, for example), and thus we 

 should have the meteoric systems composed of these parti- 

 cles circulating about their own common centr&of mass as 

 above stated, and displaying the spectrum, jfrhich Dr. 

 Huggins has found common to comets. \ 



If this is correct, the present comet comes from a sun 

 that contains metallic sodium in addition to tu,e hydro- 

 carbons, as the spectrum of this metal was seen when this 

 comet was near enough to the sun to render its vapor 

 incandescent. 



