Then
Leverrier showed that the original comet associated with the November
meteors was probably brought into the system by the influence of the
planet Uranus in the year 126 of the Christian era. Afterward
Alexander Herschel identified the tracks of no less than seventy-six
meteor-swarms (most of them inconspicuous) with those of comets. The
still more recent researches of Mr W. F. Denning make it probable that
there are no meteors which do not belong to a flock or system probably
formed by the disintegration of a cometary mass; even the apparently
sporadic ones which shoot across the sky, ``lost souls in the night,''
being members of flocks which have become so widely scattered that the
earth sometimes takes weeks to pass through the region of space where
their paths lie.
The November meteors should have exhibited another pair of spectacles
in 1899 and 1900, and their failure to do so caused at first much
disappointment, until it was made plain that a good reason existed for
their absence. It was found that after their last appearance, in 1867,
they had been disturbed in their movements by the planets Jupiter and
Saturn, whose attractions had so shifted the position of their orbit
that it no longer intersected that of the earth, as it did before.
Whether another planetary interference will sometime bring the
principal mass of the November meteors back to the former point of
intersection with the earth's orbit is a question for the future to
decide.
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