which have become so widely scattered that the earth sometimes takes weeks to pass through the region of space where their paths lie. The November meteors should have exhibited another pair of spectacles in 1899 and 1900, and their failure to do so caused at first much disappointment, until it was made plain that a good reason existed for their absence. It was found that after their last appearance, in 1867, they had been disturbed in their movements by the planets Jupiter and Saturn, whose attractions had so shifted the position of their orbit that it no longer intersected that of the earth, as it did before. Whether another planetary interference will sometime bring the principal mass of the November meteors back to the former point of intersection with the earth’s orbit is a question for the future to decide. It would seem that there may be several parallel streams of the November meteors, and that some of them, like those of August, are distributed entirely around the orbit, so that every mid-November we see a few of them. We come now to a very remarkable example of the disintegration of a comet and the formation of a meteor-stream. In 1826 Biela, of Josephstadt, Austria, discovered a comet to which his name was given. Calculation showed that it had an orbital period of about six and a half years, belonging to Jupiter’s “family.” On one of its returns, in 1846, it astonished its watchers by suddenly splitting in two. The two comets thus formed out of one separated to a distance of about one hundred and sixty thousand miles, and then raced side by side, sometimes with a curious ligature connecting them, like Siamese twins, until they disappeared together in interplanetary space. In 1852 they came back, still nearly side by side, but now the distance between them had increased to a million and a quarter of miles. After that, at every recurrence of their period, astronomers looked for them in vain, until 1872, when an amazing thing happened. On the night of November 28th, when the earth was crossing the plane of the orbit of the missing comet, a brilliant shower of meteors burst from the northern sky, traveling nearly in the track which the comet should have pursued. The astronomers were electrified. Klinkerfues, of Göttingen, telegraphed to Pogson, of Madras: _“Biela touched earth; search near Theta Centauri.”_ Pogson searched in the place indicated and saw a cometary mass retreating into the southern heavens, where it was soon swallowed from sight! [Illustration: Section of the atmosphere up to 100 kilometers. Showing the mean elevation at which meteorites and meteors make their appearance. Below are shown the elevation of Mount Everest, the highest manned balloon ascent by M. Berson; the height of cirrus clouds; the highest free balloon ascent; and the elevation attained by the clouds of fire-dust ejected by the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. (From _La Nature_)]