CA On ihe Iron Meteorite 



Amei-ic.in Journal of Science, for February and June, 1886,) and 

 I assure you " it shall be to you as interesting as a novel." and- 

 '^ what is known is therein sharply separated from what is con- 

 jectured." 



Not a few astronomers wonld have ns believe that comets are 

 the ' scavengers of space/ and have accreted their mass and ob- 

 tained their motion l)y the simple laws of gravitation and of 

 chemical affinity ; bnt a cai-eful study of meteoric masses— which 

 are but the debris of comets — leads ns to look for their birth- 

 place within some sun or in regions where tremendous pressure 

 must have had an existence ; else the i-emarkahle quantities of 

 occluded gases and the otherwise plutonic character of meteorites 

 remain inexplicable. Let us turn to the lately advanced theory 

 of Mr. Eichard A Proctor, for an explanation of great plausi- 

 bility, and which seems to answer all the known conditions of 

 comets and their attendant trains. Before stating his conclu- 

 sions in abstract, I would remind the reader that he must first 

 bring himself to believe that a body has power enough, within 

 itself, to project a part of itself beyond the sphere of its own 

 attraction. If you can believe this, then Mr. Proctor's theory 

 is at once acceptable. He states* : "All the evidence tends 

 not merely to show but to prove, that all orders of meteors, 

 and therefore all orders of comets, came from the interior of bo- 

 dies like the suns and the planets, when in the sunlike stages of 

 their respective careers. All the evidence tends further to prove 

 that sunlike bodies have the power of ejection which this 

 theory of meteoric origin requires. It is to the sunlike stage 

 of any planet's life that we are to look for the time when ejec- 

 tion of the kind required was possible ; and our sun is the only 

 case of a sunlike body we can inquire into. If he cannot eject 

 solid bodies, neither could any body when it was a sun, But 

 cannot and does not the sun eject solid bodies ?" 



" Those who imagine the eruption prominences to be what they 

 seem to be — jets of glowing gas — may be disposed to answer in 

 the negative. But in reality nothing can be much less likely 

 than that the jet-shaped streaks of hydrogen were themselves 

 ejected. Manifestly they indicate the tracks of denser bodies, 



* Letter to the Editor of the New York Tribune. Sep. 20, ] 886. 



