pounds weight were secured.  On the evening of December 21st, 1876, a meteor of unusual size and brilliancy passed over the states of Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.  It was first seen in the western part of Kansas, at an altitude of about sixty miles.  In crossing the State of Missouri it began to explode, and this breaking up continued while passing Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, till it consisted of a large flock of brilliant balls chasing each other across the sky, the number being variously estimated at from twenty to one hundred.  It was accompanied by terrific explosions, and was seen along a path of not less than a thousand miles.  When first seen in Kansas, it is said to have appeared as large as the full moon, and with a train from twenty-five to one hundred feet long.  Another, very similar in appearance and behavior, passed over a part of the same course in February, 1879.  At Laigle, France, on April 26th, 1803, about one o’clock in the day, from two to three thousand fell.  The largest did not exceed seventeen pounds weight.  One fell in Weston, Connecticut, in 1807, weighing two hundred pounds.  A very destructive shower is mentioned in the book of Joshua, chap. x. ver. 11.

These bodies are not evenly distributed through space.  In some places they are gathered into systems which circle round the sun in orbits as certain as those of the [Page 124] planets.  The chain of asteroids is an illustration of meteoric bodies on a large scale.  They are hundreds in number—­meteors are millions.  They have their region of travel, and the sun holds them and the giant Jupiter by the same power.  The Power that cares for a world cares for a sparrow.  If their orbit so lies that a planet passes through it, and the planet and the meteors are at the point of intersection at the same time, there must be collisions, and the lightning signs of extinction proportioned to the number of little bodies in a given space.

It is demonstrated that the earth encounters more than one hundred such systems of meteoric bodies in a single year.  It passes through one on the 10th of August, another on the 11th of November.  In a certain part of the first there is an agglomeration of bodies sufficient to become visible as it approaches the sun, and this is known as the comet of 1862; in the second is a similar agglomeration, known as Temple’s comet.  It is repeating the same thing to say that meteoroids follow in the train of the comets.  The probable orbit of the November meteors and the comet of 1866 is an exceedingly elongated ellipse, embracing the orbit of the earth at one end and a portion of the orbit of Uranus at the other (Fig. 51).  That of the August meteors and the comet of 1862 embraces the orbit of the earth at one end, and thirty per cent. of the other end is beyond the orbit of Neptune.

[Illustration:  Fig. 51.—­Orbit of the November Meteors and the Comet or 1866.]