developed and most regular. The matter raised up in these envelopes seems to have undergone a certain change of character, causing it no longer to obey the sun's attractive influence, but to experience a strong repulsive action from him, whereby it is apparently swept away with great rapidity to form the tail. 'It flows past the nucleus,' says Dr. Huggins, 'on all sides, still ever expanding and shooting backward until a tail is formed in the direction opposite to the sun. This tail is usually curved, though sometimes rays or extra tails sensibly straight are also seen.'" In "The Sun as a Perpetual Machine," Professor Proctor says, "Take, again, the phenomena of comets, which still remain among the greatest of nature's mysteries. We have reason to believe ... that the nucleus of a comet consists of an aggregation of stones similar to meteorites. Adopting this view, and assuming that these stones have absorbed somewhere gases to the amount of six times their volume (taken at atmospheric pressure), we may ask, What will be the effect of such a mass of stones advancing towards the sun at a velocity reaching in perihelion the prodigious rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles per second (as observed in the comet of 1843), being twenty-three times our orbital rate of motion?" Professor Ball says, "One of the most important results of the great shower of 1866 was the demonstration that the swarm of little bodies to which that shower owed its origin was connected with a comet. The swarm was found, in fact, to follow the exact track which the comet pursued around the sun.... Of this connection between the cometary orbits and revolving swarms of meteors many other instances could be cited. I may refer to the remarkable lists published by the British Association, in which, beside the name of the comet or the designation which astronomers had affixed to it, the meteoric swarm with which the comet is associated is also given.... On these grounds it appears to be perfectly certain that the origin of the shooting stars which appear in swarms cannot be disassociated from the origin of the comets by which those swarms are accompanied." The author makes a distinction between such ordinary shooting stars and meteorites, and attributes the appearance of the latter on earth to masses thrown forth from some volcano somewhere, but this has nothing to do with the special phenomena to be interpreted. It may be said, however, that the presence of olefiant gas as one of the occluded gases in a meteorite (four and fifty-five-hundredths per cent., as stated by Professor Proctor, in his article "The Sun as a Perpetual Machine"), and the remarkable fact, stated in the article "Spectrum Analysis" in Appleton's Cyclopædia, that, in Winnecke's comet of 1868, "the bands agree in position with those obtained as the spectrum of carbon, by passing the electric spark through olefiant gas, "would lead one to consider a cometic origin, for this particular