things which are for some time supposed to be certainly true, come, at another time, to be considered as certainly false.

2. I hardly believe that such as listen to me can find, in any other book, so many hints about the riches that are contained in the heavens, or in the total ethereal space, beyond the simple list of sun, moon, and stars. But, if some modern astronomers are right, there is still more to add. "A new planetary world, says M. Arago, "begins to open upon us!" Lately, accounts of vast showers of shooting stars, observed in many parts of the Northern hemisphere, (including Europe and Asia, as well as America,) and always on or about the same day of the same month; and these accounts have given encouragement to a belief, that there exists in the Solar System a zone of millions of minute planetary bodies, revolving in groups around the sun; one of which groups, under concurrent circumstances, meets the earth on its revolution in its orbit, at the point which it passes yearly between the 11th, 13th, or 14th of the month of November.

3. The possible existence of other members of the Solar System than those so long familiar to us has been readily admitted. Planet after planet, and comet after comet, is successively discovered. Besides the little planet discovered by Signor Cacciatore in 1836, M. Wartmann, of Geneva, reported, in 1831, his observation of a celestial body which had the appearance of star of the seventh or eighth magnitude, but which

moved like a planet; and which, having lost sight of it through cloudy weather, he has never yet been able to behold again. Having laid down, upon a sheet of paper, the positions of certain stars near which the planet Uranus was to pass, he saw, on the following night, that one of them had changed its place. He watched its motion for two months, during all which time it continued its progress, which was in the contrary direction to the order of the signs of the zodiac. It remains to be known, whether this, too, is a planet to be hereafter added to our histories.

4. Laplace believes the attractive power of the sun to fill a sphere, of which from the centre to the circumference is a distance of a hundred millions of times greater than the distance of the sun from the earth. Remember that this latter distance is ninety-five millions of miles; making, of the whole, ninety-five hundred millions of miles. But Uranus itself is only nineteen times more distant from the sun than even our distant earth; while the solar attraction continues beyond Uranus itself eighty-one times the distance of the earth! Here is ample room, then, both within and without the orbit of Uranus, for the existence of members of the Solar System with which we are still entirely unacquainted! There may be both small bodies and large, belonging to the Solar System, never yet hitherto discovered from the earth, and which must continue undiscovered from it for ever!

5. But M. Arago has fancied the discovery of new

millions of at least small bodies. I have told you of that gentleman's estimate of the comets of our system at a number exceeding seven millions, and now I am to add, that he believes we have some countless millions of small planetary bodies; primary but minute planets, moving, in throngs, in a single orbit which surrounds the sun!

6. The belief of M. Arago arises out of some late observations of an annual appearance of shooting or falling stars, now spoken of as the annual appearance of the " November Asteroids." Now of this I am going to tell you more.

CHAPTER LVIII.

MORE ABOUT SHOOTING OR FALLING STARS. ABOUT STAR-JELLY, OR STAR-SHOT, OR NOSTOC. ABOUT FIRE-BALLS AND AEROLITES. ·

1. You have often seen shooting or falling stars. Perhaps you have seen sky-rockets also. If you have, you may also have found some small resemblance between the two; for, at least, the shooting or falling stars, after running, for an instant, through the sky, appear to burst in the air, and to disperse themselves in shining sparks, which soon fade and vanish, or become extinct.

2. Perhaps you have even run to the spot where you thought the extinguished sparks must have fallen, in order to find their substance; as, perhaps, you have

also run after rocket-sticks, toward the spots where they have seemed to fall. If you have done none of those things, at least others have done so, both before and since you were born!

3. But, though we know the appearance of these shooting or falling stars, what, in reality, are they; and of what nature is the substance which it has been supposed possible to find and pick up, after it has fallen, and become dark and cold?

4. These have long been subjects of different opinions, though never, till now, of the opinions lately advanced. Shooting or falling stars have generally been held as no stars at all, but only meteors; or bodies which belong to the atmosphere of the earth.

5. I must mention them again, and more at length but as, at present, some suspect them to be really stars, or at least planetary bodies of our system, I am obliged to speak of them in the very Tales which you are reading.

6. Shooting or falling stars have been considered fiery meteors. Fiery meteors are exhalations from the earth, and move only in our atmosphere, and not in the great heavenly space. They are always seen, and sometimes heard also, to explode; and the explosion is often known to be followed by the fall of meteoric stones: the whole, as to the manner, (though upon a scale so immeasurably larger,) like the explosion of a sky-rocket, and the fall of its sparks, and paper, and stick. But I must add no more to the history of meteoric stones.

7. Fiery meteors of large sizes are called fire-balls, but these are of rare appearance. Those comparatively small are frequent, and are called falling or shooting stars; and while, from the explosions of some at least of the former, we derive the earthy and metallic substances at present called either aërolites or air-stones, or meteorites or meteoric stones; the multitude, if not the philosophers themselves, have sometimes fancied that, as to their substance, the latter fell upon the earth in the shape of a gelatinous or jelly-like substance, which has been called "star-jelly" and "star-shot; and to find which, at the supposed falling or shooting of a star, boys and men have run just as we now see them run to find a rocket-stick.

8. A gelatinous substance is occasionally found on the grass, and even sometimes on the branches of trees, the origin of which the modern learned do not ascribe either to stars or to meteors; but which they are divided as to regarding either as an animal or vegetable production. The vegetablists name it tremella nostoch,* and say that it is a fungous plant, quick of growth, and of short duration, but of which even the seed has been discovered; but the animalists, though differing from each other in subordinate respects, agree in affirming it

*Or nostoc; for nostoch has been reproved as a wrong spelling. "Tremella, in botany," says Withering, "a genus of the class cryptogamia, order algæ. Tremella-nostoc is not uncommon after rain, in grass-fields and gravel-walks, and is vulgarly supposed to be the remains of a meteor or fallen star." Darwin, as I shall mention presently, keeps to its origin, frogs.