xty days, that
is, after the earth's encounter with its meteoric fragments. These are
now probably scattered over more than five hundred million miles of its
orbits;[1230] yet Professor Newton considers that all must have formed
one compact group with Biela at the time of its close approach to
Jupiter about the middle of 1841. For otherwise both comet and
meteorites could not have experienced, as they seem to have done, the
same kind and amount of disturbance. The rapidity of cometary
disintegration is thus curiously illustrated.

A short-lived persuasion that the missing heavenly body itself had been
recovered, was created by Mr. Edwin Holms's discovery, at London,
November 6, 1892, of a tolerably bright, tailless comet, just in a spot
which Biela's comet must have traversed in approaching the intersection
of its orbit with that of the earth. A hasty calculation by Berberich
assigned elements to the newcomer seeming not only to ratify the
identity, but to promise a quasi-encounter with the earth on November
21. The only effect of the prediction, however, was to raise a panic
among the negroes of the Southern States of America. The comet quietly
ignored it, and moved away from instead of towards the appointed
meeting-place. Its projection, then, on the night of its discovery, upon
a point of the Biela-orbit was by a mere caprice of chance. North
America, nevertheless, was visited on November 23 by a genuine Andromede
shower. Although the meteors were less numerous than in 1885, Professor
Young estimated that 30,000, at the least, of their orange fire-streaks
came, during five hours, within the range of view at Princeton.[1231]
Bredikhine estimated the width of the space containing them at about
2,700,000 miles.[1232] The anticipation of their due time by four days
implied--if they were a prolongation of the main Biela group, the
nucleus of which passed the spot of encounter five months previously--a
recession of the node since 1885 by no less than three degrees. Unless,
indeed, Mr. Denning were right in supposing the display to have
proceeded from "an associated branch of the main swarm through which we
passed in 1872 and 1885."[1233] The existence of separated detachments
of Biela meteors, due to disturbing planetary action, was contemplated
as highly probable by Schiaparelli.[1234] Such may have been the belated
flights met with in 1830, 1838, 1841, and 1847, and such the advance
flight plunged through in 1892. A show