Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/407

Rh its course round the sun, like the planets, in a certain fixed period of years. From this it is evident that the orbits of comets may occur at every possible angle to that of the earth, and that their motion will be sometimes progressive and sometimes retrograde.

The history of the cosmical cloud does not, however, end with its transformation into a comet. Schiaparelli shows in a striking manner that, as a comet is not a solid mass, but consists of particles, each possessing an independent motion, the head or nucleus nearer the sun must necessarily complete its orbit in less time than the more distant portions of the tail. The tail will therefore lag behind the nucleus in



the course of the comet's revolution, and the comet, being more and more elongated, will at last be either partially or entirely resolved into a ring of meteors. In this way the whole path of the comet becomes strewed with portions of its mass, with those small, dark meteoric bodies which, when penetrating the earth's atmosphere, become luminous, and appear as falling stars. Instead of the comet, there now revolves round the sun a broad ring of meteoric stones, which occasion the phenomena we every year observe as the August meteors. Whether this ring be continuous, and the meteoric masses strewed along the whole course of the path of the original comet, or whether the individual meteors, as in the November shower, have not filled up entirely the whole orbit, but are still partially in the form of a comet,