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EASTMAN. 
have crossed the stream at many places along a length of a 
thousand millions of miles, sometimes in advance of and 
sometimes behind the comet, and all along this length have 
been found fragments—sometimes few, sometimes many. 
This form of the stream suggests continuous action produc¬ 
ing it. A brief, violent action might have given this form, 
but a slowly acting cause seems more natural. 
Again, in the history of Biela’s comet we have distinct 
evidence of continued action. The comet divided into two 
parts not long before 1845, and yet in 1798 fragments of it 
were met with so far from the comet that they must have 
left the comet long before, probably many centuries ago. 
“ Thus we are led to say, first, that the periodic meteors 
of November, of August, of April, &c., are caused by solid 
fragments of certain known or unknown comets coming into 
our air; secondly , that the sporadic meteors, such as we can 
see any clear night, are the like fragments of other comets ; 
thirdly, that the large fire-balls are only larger fragments of 
the same kind ; and, finally, that a portion broken off from 
one of those large fragments in coming through the air must 
once have been a part of a comet” 
“ How came the comet to break up? Perhaps the prior 
question would be, How came the comet together ? In its 
* history there is much that cannot yet be explained, much 
about which we can only speculate.” 
“ Thus, how came this meteoric stone to have its curious 
interior structure? As a mineral it resembles more the 
deepest fire-rocks than it does the outer crust of the earth. 
It seems to have been formed in some large mass, possibly 
in one larger than any of our existing comets. Some facts 
show that the comets have almost surely come to us from 
the stellar spaces. Out somewhere in the cold of space a 
condensing mass furnished heat for the making of this stone. 
The surrounding atmosphere was unlike ours, since some of 
these minerals could hardly have been made in the presence 
of the oxygen of our air. Either in cooling or by some ca¬ 
tastrophe the rocky mass may have been broken to pieces, 
