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198, not, indeed, to satisfy your curiosity in all matters concerning me and my brethren, but to give you some few scraps of information and stray hints about us, leaving you to make the best use of them you may, in your interminable cruise on the endless sea of speculation.

Well, then, I am one of a most numerous family. Johannes Kepler—one of those bright intellectual stars that adorn and illumine your microscopic mite of a sphere, and render it interesting even to the giants of creation—declared that “there are more comets in space than fishes in the ocean.” A kindred spirit, a Kepler of the present age—Arago—has calculated our number at some three and a half millions at the lowest computation, and possibly twice as many. We are of all sizes and magnitudes, from the incredibly immense down to the minutest telescopic.