sort scattered much more
densely through space; but we have not a particle of evidence that this
actually is the case. All we certainly _know_ about star-cloudlets
suggest that the distances separating them from each other are
comparable with those which separate star from star, in which case the
idea of a star coming into collision with a star-cloudlet, and still
more the idea of this occurring several times in a century, is wild in
the extreme.

On the whole, the theory seems more probable than any of these, that
enormous flights of large meteoric masses travel around those stars
which thus occasionally break forth in conflagration, such flights
travelling on exceedingly eccentric paths, and requiring enormously long
periods to complete each circuit of their vast orbits. In conceiving
this, we are not imagining anything new. Such a meteoric flight would
differ only in degree not kind from meteoric flights which are known to
circle around our own sun. I am not sure, indeed, that it can be
definitely asserted that our sun has no meteoric appendages of the same
nature as those which, if this theory be true, excite to intense
periodic activity the sun round which they circle. We know that comets
and meteors are closely connected, every comet being probably (many
certainly) attended by flights of meteoric masses. The meteors which
produce the celebrated November showers of falling stars follow in the
track of a comet invisible to the naked eye. May we not reasonably
suppose, then, that those glorious comets which have not only been
visible but conspicuous, shining even in the day-time, and brandishing
round tails which, like that of the 'wonder in heaven, the great
dragon,' seemed to 'draw the third part of the stars of heaven,' are
followed by much denser flights of much more massive meteors? Now some
among these giant comets have paths which carry them very close to our
sun. Newton's comet, with its tail a hundred millions of miles in
length, all but grazed the sun's globe. The comet of 1843, whose tail,
says Sir J. Herschel, 'stretched half-way across the sky,' must actually
have grazed the sun, though but lightly, for its nucleus was within
80,000 miles of his surface, and its head was more than 160,000 miles in
diameter. And these are only two among the few comets whose paths are
known. At any time we might be visited by a comet mightier than either,
travelling on an orbit intersecting the sun's surface, followed by