30 



so this result ought scarcely to be allowed to invalidate Pasteur's 

 conclusions, of which, I may add, he is as confident as ever. 



Astronomers have not been idle ; they have discovered eight new 

 planets and some six new, or at any rate unrecorded, comets 

 during the past year. But the great event was, of course, the 

 discovery of the new bright star in the Nebula of Andromeda. As 

 our telescopes increase in power and sharpness of definition, so 

 more and more of the supposed Nebulae are desolved into separate 

 stars or suns, until some authorities are disposed to doubt whether 

 any really nebulous matter exists within our ken. 



In America they are making a magnificent telescope for the Lick 

 Observatory, on Mount Hamilton, with a flint glass disc of thirty- 

 eight inches diameter, which ought to make the moon, which is 

 240,000 miles distant, appear as if only one hundred miles away, 

 and should render visible any object on its surface of the same size 

 as many of our public buildings. The meteor shower of the 17th 

 November last was perhaps the most brilliant and remarkable one 

 is likely to witness in a lifetime, the meteors fell at the rate of fifty 

 or sixty a minute, and about 7 p.m, almost resembled a display of 

 rockets, as many as five or six being visible simultaneously ; as a 

 countryman quaintly remarked " Yer couldn't look at a star but 

 what it run away " ! In the north of London they were seen to fall 

 at the rate of 5,000 an hour. Everyone, nowadays, knows there 

 are zones of small solid bodies, tiny worlds in miniature, revolvin^j 

 round the sun in ecliptical orbits, and that these small spheres, 

 travelling at the rate of 1,200 miles a minute, become ignited from 

 the rapid friction in passing through the earth's atmosphere. As 

 the iron and nickel of which meteorites are composed is found to 

 exist in the same combination in certain volcanic products, it has 

 been surmised by some that meteors may possibly be the fragments 

 of an exploded planet. 



Photography has again recently been lending important aid to 

 Astronomy by recording the actual movements of the so-called 

 " Fixed " Stars, and showing the direction of their course through 

 the heavens. So far from being fixed, we know these stars to be 

 whirling through space with a velocity in comparison with which 

 the rush of our earth round the sun, or the enormously rapid 

 movement of that great centre in its own mighty course, is only as 

 the slow crawl of a tortoise. Whither, and through what in- 

 conceivably vast empyrean are all heavenly bodies hurrying ? bhall 

 we, can we ever know ? 



You will be gratified to learn that a French Savant, M. Mortillet, 

 has discovered the celebrated " Missing link," so long and hitherto 

 vainly sought. In the Miocene Strata he has found (so he says) 

 the fossil common progenitor of man and monkey, and he produces 



