We read in story-books of uncomfortable people who have cherished a guilty secret in their bosoms, that it has “gnawed their vitals,” until at last they have carried it to the grave. I have such a secret that does the gnawing business whenever I write or speak of comets, concerning the origin of which I am guilty of an hypothesis that has hitherto been cherished as aforesaid from the very shame of adding another to an already exaggerated heap of speculations on celestial physics.

It assumes, in the first place, that all the other suns which we see as stars are constituted like our own sun; that they eject great eruptions similar to the prominences above described, and even of vastly greater magnitude, as in the case of the flashing stars that have excited so much wonderment among astronomers, but which I regard simply as suns like ours, subject, like ours, to periodic maximum and minimum activities, but of greater magnitude.

If such is the case, some of the prominence matter or vaporous constituents of these suns must be ejected with much greater proportional violence than are those from our sun. But those from our sun have been proved to rush out on some occasions with a velocity so great that the solar gravitation cannot bring them back. If such is ever the case with the explosions of our sun, it must be of frequent occurrence with the greater explosions of certain stars, and therefore vast quantities of meteoric matter are continually ejected into space, and traveling there until they come within the gravitation domain of some other sun like ours, when they will necessarily be bent into such orbits as those of comets.

But what will be the nature of this meteoric matter?

If from our sun, it would be a multitude of metallic hailstones, due to the condensation of the metallic vapor by cooling as it leaves the sun, and such meteoric hail would correspond to the meteoric stones that fall upon our earth, and which, for reasons stated in “The Fuel of the Sun,” I believe to be of solar origin. Besides these, there would be ice-hail, such as Schevedorf claims to be meteoric.

A star mainly composed of hydrogen and carbon, or densely enveloped in these gases (as the spectroscope indicates to be the case in some of these flashing stars), would eject hydrocarbon vapors, condensible by cooling into solids similar to those we obtain by the condensation of terrestrial hydrocarbon vapors (paraffin, camphor, turpentine, and all the essential oils, for example), and thus we should have the meteoric systems composed of these particles circulating about their own common centre of mass as above stated, and displaying the spectrum which Dr. Huggins has found common to comets.

If this is correct, the present comet comes from a sun that contains metallic sodium in addition to the hydrocarbons, as the spectrum of this metal was seen when this comet was near enough to the sun to render its vapor incandescent.