themselves consciously or unconsciously some supreme aim towards which their energies are bent. Military power, extension of territory, political unity, dynastic aggrandisement, or the maintenance of some particular religious creed, have been at various times the all-absorbing objects on which the minds of great nations have been bent; and as none of these has been entirely good, so none has been entirely discreditable. The noblest object, which all honour and few pursue, is the well-being of the people; the worst and meanest is that to which we in England are supposed to have devoted ourselves-the mere aggregation of enormous heaps of money, while we are careless what becomes of the hands,' as we call them, by which all the money is created.

We have a vast empire-we have infinite land waiting only to be occupied-we have a population larger than we can employ, even on our own theory of the manner in which we should wish to employ them, crowded into lanes and alleys and cellars, seething in drunkenness and pollution; of the children born in these places the fate of those that die being more blessed a thousandfold than of those who survive. We have or we had a teeming Ireland, from which millions had to be removed to escape starvation we let the Irish go to the United States, careless of consequences so long as the immediate value of the landlord's property was not affected. We deliberately refuse to carry the overflow of our own people to lands which are crying out to be tilled, where they can live in health and abundance, and where the death of a child, instead of a relief, is a material loss. We will not lift a finger to save our voluntary emigrants to our own Crown, or those who remain from the drinkshops, or our national good name from the reproach of commercial dishonesty. We profess a righteous

VOL. III.-NO. XIV. NEW SERIES.

horror of slavery; but the English farm laborer who has been rash enough to marry is as much a slave under the lash of hunger as the negro under the whip, and is so much more unhappy than the slave that he has no refuge but the workhouse in sickness and old age. He is told, in insolent irony, that he is a free man, and may go where he pleases. Rather, he may go away if he can; and those who mock him with the name of freedom know well that he lies in an enchanted circle of necessity that he must stay passive under the barest wages which will keep life in him and his, under penalty of starvation if he resist or make an effort to escape.

When

This it is which has lowered English credit-that we have grown oblivious of all generous principles, that patriotism has become a jest, and that nothing is considered worthy of a serious man's attention but what will put money in his purse. Words travel far in these days of newspapers. a great capitalist said of emigration during the late stagnation of trade, when millions were starving, 'Keep our men at home-we shall want them when trade revives,' the world heard of it, and made its comments. English working men, it seems, exist only to fill rich men's pockets. The House of Commons cheered a well-known speaker when, as a crowning argument against assistance to emigrate being granted by the State, he argued that it would displease the Americans. An English politician declares that he is afraid of helping men and women in search of employment from one part of the Queen's dominions to another for fear a foreign Power might not like it. Parliament approves, and we are surprised that we are no longer respected. Wonderful consideration for American sensitiveness!-wonderful new-born consideration, of a kind however, which they are so little inclined to

М

appreciate! Let us take courage. Were we suddenly to show ourselves practically alive to the condition of our people, and set apart for the sake of them some small portion of our enormous income, the Americans would forgive us as soon as they had recovered from their astonishment, even if it took the form of sending families to Canada.

'You will increase taxation,' shriek the economists. 'Money must be taken from those who have it, and laid out upon those who have

not.' Be it so. We lay on taxes without scruple for a war, and it is a war which we are advocating. When the interests of the nation require killing and burning and destroying, we are all called on to contribute, and are ridiculed if we complain. In the same interests of the nation we may tax ourselves for a war on misery and vice and over-population. Is it not as honourable to save life as to destroy-to rescue millions from wretchedness as to plunge millions into mourning and woe?

Author of The Sun,'
NE of the most remarkable

scientific progress has been the slowness with which the full significance of important discoveries has been recognised even by the professed students of science. When a great discovery is made, one can understand that some delay should occur before the newly learned fact is accepted as a recognised truth; but when some great new truth has been admitted on all hands, it might be supposed that all the consequences which follow from that truth would at once be accepted; or rather that the students of science would vie with each other in pushing the search for such results to its utmost legitimate limits.

This, however, seldom happens. Whether it is that a discovery effected by another is regarded as not presenting an inviting subject of study and contemplation; or whether it is that men are ready to hope more from their own original researches than from work devoted to the investigation of the discoveries of others; or whether, lastly (but surely this cannot be the true interpretation), it is feared that all credit for results obtained by studying a truth discovered by another will be assigned to him-it is certain that we very seldom find the students of science willing to analyse the results obtained by other

it is left very much to itself, and only

gathered in.

The discoveries recently made by Schiaparelli, Adams, and others, respecting the bodies called meteors (under which name may be conveniently included shooting-stars, aerolites, bolides, and the like), afford a very apt illustration of the peculiarity I have referred to. The consequences which flow directly from these discoveries, and still more those which may be legitimately deduced from them by careful reasoning, are full of interest, and bear in a most important manner on the economy of the solar system; nay, it needs but a moderate study of the subject to see that questions affecting even the relations of the interplanetary spaces are suggested by the discoveries which have recently been made respecting meteors and their motions. Yet but few among modern astronomers have been willing to make researches into these matters. Professors Herschel and Newcombe, Mr. Stoney, Sir John Herschel, and a few others, have dealt with the subject; but the great body of astronomers would seem almost to have forgotten that Schiaparelli and Adams had made any important discoveries at all in this matter.

I propose briefly to describe the discoveries referred to, and then to consider some of the conclusions which may be deduced from them.

Less than ten years ago a comparatively insignificant position was assigned to meteors, regarded as members of the solar system. It was but recently, indeed, that these bodies had come to be looked upon as belonging to the solar system at all. From being regarded as a species of exhalations consumed

during some sudden processes of change in the upper region of air, they had risen to the rank of volcanic missiles from the moon. Next, the occurrence of meteoric showers at certain definite times of the year-that is, as the earth traverses certain definite parts of her orbit-had compelled astronomers to recognise the fact that meteor systems must exist, which regarded as systems occupy a relatively fixed position in the solar system. The individual meteors may or rather must be in swift motion; and if a meteor system includes a swarm of meteors, then that swarm must also be in swift motion: but regarding the system as a whole, it must have the same sort of relative fixity which the earth's orbit itself has. Otherwise the occurrence of annual showers would remain unaccounted for; since we require that near a certain point the earth's path should be crossed or closely approached by the track of the meteors belonging to a system-and that not for a single year, but for many years or even centuries in succession.

Now, directing their search to other parts of the solar system, astronomers presently found what they took to be the analogue of the meteor families traversed by the earth. The zone of asteroids consists of a number of relatively minute bodies travelling around the sun. Distinct in all its characteristics from the family of smaller planets circling close by his globe, and equally distinct from the moon-attended family of outer planets, the asteroidal zone may be regarded as forming a family apart. Now, we do not know how many members there may be in this family, nor do we know what may be the extreme limits of its range, either outwards towards the family of major planets, or inwards towards the terrestrial family of planets. But what we know respecting it teaches us to infer that if all the asteroidal orbits could be seen as rings of light

around the sun from some distant station, the combined system of rings would form a ring system whose densest portion would appear as a nearly circular and somewhat flat zone between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and close to the plane of the ecliptic. And we have only to conceive the case of a large planet circling around the sun along the thick part of this ring to see that results analogous to those presented as the earth circles amidst the imagined meteor systems would inevitably follow.

Hence astronomers inferred that a number of meteor systems travelling in orbits of no considerable eccentricity occupy the region through which the earth's orbit passes. The boldest reasoned that, in all probability, the whole space between the earth's orbit and the sun was more or less occupied by these meteor systems, and that some of the systems might even pass to moderate distances outside the earth's orbit. The phenomenon known as the zodiacal light was associated with the existence of such meteoric systems, though the idea of such an association was scouted by not a few as wild and chimerical.

But the actual facts, as revealed by recent researches, are far more wonderful, whether we regard their direct significance or the conclusions which may fairly be deduced from them.

The history of these researches reads almost like a romance, so strange are the coincidences and the examples of 'good luck' which it presents to our consideration.

In the first place, the approach of the expected display of November meteors in 1866 led many astronomers to direct their attention very specially to the subject of meteoric astronomy. Not only were observations made much more systematically than in previous years, but the records of former phenomena were carefully searched, and in particular those which relate to the