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.