82 Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 



Is this ingenious meteoric theory supported by scientific evidence ? 

 In a series of elaborate articles published in Nature, which are well 

 epitomized in a recent number of Harper's Magazine, Lockyer 

 calls to his aid the spectroscope — that marvelous instrument which 

 not only unlocks the hidden secrets of the chemical substances 

 within our reach, but reveals the physical constitution and the very 

 temperature of worlds wheeling in distant space. By means of this 

 infallible agent he shows that meteorites under the blowpipe and in 

 the electric arc present certain phenomena corresponding exactly 

 to those observed in certain fixed stars and in many of the 

 unresolved nebulae 



The inference, then, seems fair that many variable stars of the 

 first class (non-periodical) and of the second class (those having 

 long but inexact periods) may have their rational explanation in 

 Lockyer' s theory of the collisions of meteoric nebulous matter. 

 But for variables of the third class or Algol type (those having 

 short, sharply defined periods with brief obscuration) a different 

 cause must be assigned; and though not entirely free from obje< 

 tions, the most plausible explanation of all the phenomena observ. d 

 is that which supposes the intervention of a dark revolving bodv. 



This, of course, presumes the rather remarkable coincident 

 that there are several pairs of stars — one luminous and the other 

 dark — revolving about each other in a plane identical with the 

 terrestrial observer. But the coincidence does not seem so strange 

 when we consider that these icw cases are the only ones, so far as 

 we know, among the sixty millions of telescopic worlds whose light 

 converges to us from the celestial sphere. 



