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EASTMAN. 
if not always, at least in general, to move across the sky 
away from the ecliptic. The fact is otherwise. Both large 
and small meteors are seen moving towards the ecliptic as 
often as from it. Neither class seem, therefore, to have any 
relation to the planets. 
Again, in general character the two classes are alike. 
They have like varieties of color; they have similar luminous 
trains behind them. In short, we cannot draw any line divid¬ 
ing the stone or iron producing meteor from the shooting- 
star, at least in their astronomical relations. They are all 
astronomically alike. They differ in size; but that has noth¬ 
ing to do with their motion about the sun or in space. 
The general connection between comets and meteors may 
be exhibited in the peculiar relations existing between the 
meteors of November 13-14 and their accompanying comet. 
The orbit of these meteors is one that is described in 33.25 
years. The meteors go out a little further thail the planet 
Uranus, or about twenty times as far as the earth is from 
the sun. While they all describe nearly the same orbit they 
are not collected in one compact group. On the contrary, 
they take four or five years to pass a given place in the orbit, 
and are to be thought of as a train several hundred millions 
of miles long but only a few thousands of miles in thickness. 
Along with this train of meteors travels a comet. It passed 
the place where we meet the meteor stream nearly a year 
before the great shower of 1866 and two or three years before 
the quite considerable displays of 1867 and 1868. Idow 
came it that this comet and the meteors travel the same 
road? The plane of the comet’s orbit might have cut the 
earth’s orbit to correspond with any other day of the year 
than November 15; or, cutting it at this place, the comet 
might have gone nearer to the sun or farther away; or, 
satisfying these two conditions, it might have made any 
angle from 0° to 180° instead of 167°; or, satisfying all 
these, it might have had any other periodic time than 33.25 
years; even then it might have gone off in any other direc¬ 
tion of the plane than that in which the meteoroids were 
