looked for hopefully. Its orbit had now been most carefully computed, and many observers, armed with excellent telescopes, were on the watch for it, with very accurate knowledge of the course along which it might be expected to travel, and even of its position from day to day and from hour to hour. But it was not seen. Nor, again, was it seen in 1872, when fresh computations had been made, and observations were extended over a wider range, to make sure, as was hopefully thought, that this time it should not escape recognition. Could it have come, asked Herschel in 1866--and in 1872 the same question might still more pertinently be asked--into contact or exceedingly close approach to some asteroid as yet undiscovered? or, peradventure, had it plunged into and got bewildered among the rings of meteorolites, which astronomers more than suspected? Between 1866, when Sir John Herschel thus wrote, and 1872, when again Biela's comet was sought in vain, a series of strange discoveries had been made respecting meteors, which led astronomers to believe that, even though the missing comet might never again be seen as a comet, we might still learn something respecting its present condition. It had been noticed that the remarkable comet of 1862 (comet 11 of that year) crossed the earth's track near the place where she is on August 10-11, the time of the August meteors, called the Tears of St. Lawrence in old times, but now known as the Perseids, because they seem to radiate from the constellation Perseus. Later the idea occurred to Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, that the August meteors may travel along the path of that comet. He could not prove this, but he advanced very strong evidence in favour of the opinion, for he found that bodies travelling along the path of the comet of 1862 would seem to radiate from Perseus as they traversed the earth's atmosphere. It was as if a person suspected that a steam-cloud seen on a distant railway track belonged to a particular train, and, though unable actually to prove this, was yet able to show that, with the wind and weather then prevailing, that train, travelling at its customary rate, would leave a steam-cloud behind it precisely of the apparent length and position of the observed steam-cloud. This cloud might have the observed position though otherwise produced, yet the evidence would be thought strongly to favour the supposition that it came from the train in question. In like manner the August meteors might be travelling on any one of a great number of tracks intersecting the earth's orbit in the place occupied by the earth on August 10-11; yet it was at least a striking coincidence that a flight of meteors travelling in the orbit of the chief comet of 1862 would seem to radiate from the constellation Perseus, precisely as the August meteors do.