The great November shower, which is coming once more in this century, and which every reader may hope to see toward 1899, is of particular interest to us as the first whose movements were subjected to analysis; for it has been shown by the labors of Professor Newton, of Yale, and Adams, of Cambridge, that these shooting stars are bodies moving around the sun in an orbit which is completed in about thirty-three years. It is quite certain, too, that they are not exhalations from the earth’s atmosphere, but little solids, invisible till they shine out by the light produced by their own fusion. Each, then, moves on its own track, but the general direction of all the tracks concurs; and though some of them may conceivably be solidified gases, we should think of them not as gaseous in form, but as solid shot, of the average size of something like a cherry, or perhaps even of a cherry-stone, yet each an independent planetoid, flying with a hundred times the speed of a rifle-bullet on its separate way as far out as the orbit of Uranus; coming back three times in a century to about the earth’s distance from the sun, and repeating this march forever, unless it happen to strike the atmosphere of the earth itself, when there comes a sudden flash of fire from the contact, and the distinct existence of the little body, which may have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, is ended in a second. If the reader will admit so rough a simile, we may compare such a flight of these bodies to a thin swarm of swift-flying birds--thin, but yet immensely long, so as to be, in spite of the rapid motion, several years in passing a given point, and whose line of flight is cut across by us on the 13th of November, when the earth passes through it. We are only there on that day, and can only see it then; but the swarm is years in all getting by, and so we may pass into successive portions of it on the anniversary of the same day for years to come. The stars appear to shoot from Leo, only because that constellation is in the line of their flight when we look up to it, just as an interminable train of parallel flying birds would appear to come from some definite point on the horizon.