wrong. The outrageous practice which fails to provide any remedy for those incidental damages to lands not taken, which are far worse than the mere use of land, has also its share in producing the general discontent.

A similar mischief has been felt in cities. As a matter of fact, the government of many of our cities is not in the hands of the wealthy, or even of those who owe them any particular favors. But there is the same sentiment of helplessness against the aggregate power and of dislike for its abuses. The average common council is perpetually legislating. They meddle with the ordinary uses of private property. They change established grades, lay out streets that are not needed, to benefit some particular interest, and alleys that make it impossible to find lots. deep enough for the exigencies of business. They are continually tearing up and improving at the expense of those who are not supposed to know their own interest. The burdens of these changes bear cruelly upon persons of small means whose home is their only wealth, and who sometimes are compelled to forfeit it to pay for what in theory should have enhanced its value. And our legislatures, instead of using diligence to regulate municipal authority, often refuse to listen to any reforms that do not originate with the bodies that need reforming. Opposition to extravagance is so often set down as mere dislike to improvement, that many complaints are silenced by timidity, which only increases the sense of injustice.

There is a prevailing feeling that wealth has an undue influence in our public affairs. Election expenditures are regarded as legitimate which are beyond the power of any but the rich; and there is a conviction that time is spent in the interest of moneyed enterprises which should be devoted to the general welfare. Lands are allowed to be monopolized by corporations not subject to local laws. Towns are left without outlets, to enable new ones to be built up for the benefit of neither public nor shareholders. Streams are put under special control with small regard to the riparian inhabitants. The individual is becoming helpless to cope with aggregate rivalry or aggregate opposition. There is a feeling that the popular representation is getting more remote from popular sympathy, and has not as much regard as it ought to have for interests which are not influential.

Some of the jealousies are ill-founded, but many of them are not. The history of republics has been full of illustrations of the

danger of giving financial interests too large a control in public affairs. And, rightly or wrongly, there is a large amount of distrust among people who not only have a right to be heard, but who will sooner or later exercise it.

The complaints which need most attention do not come from radicals and disorganizers, but from those steady citizens who are our best guards against them. The remedies sought for are not agrarian laws or nihilistic schemes, but greater respect for private rights. It will not do to waste words in platitudes that demonstrate that our system already secures them. The best constitutions give powers that are capable of oppressive uses. We would all spurn the old Saxon rule which measured the cost of crime and outrage by the victim's wealth. But any system which allows small or moderate interests to be subjected to larger interests, involving no public advantage, belongs to the same category. The theory of our Government ranks men above things, and natural persons over artificial ones. The encroachments of irresponsible power are not altogether imaginary. Laws may not always prevent them, but sound policy may keep them from becoming dangerous. It would be a serious mischief if the uneasiness which is now found among reasonable men, without regard to party lines, should be driven to making common cause with doctrinaires to get things righted.

JAMES V. CAMPBELL.

THE ORIGIN OF COMETS.

WE find among men of science a singular mixture of caution and daring, degenerating sometimes into timidity on the one hand, and into rashness on the other. The scientific caution of a Newton, testing the theory of gravitation by line and measure, and calmly resigning it for awhile, because, as it chanced, line and measure were both inexact, may be compared with the noble daring of a Halley, boldly announcing that the comet of 1682 would return in 1758* on the strength of observations which, in our day, would certainly be thought insufficient to determine a comet's period. The timidity with which the profound reasoning of Olmsted respecting meteors was rejected, till simple observations made that obvious which he had made certain, may be contrasted with the rashness shown by those who have accepted the speculations of Laplace about the universe as though these were demonstrated theories.

Comets, the most mysterious of all the bodies known to astronomers, have been subjects of most marked timidity and of most daring rashness of scientific reasoning. That men should have been unwilling to formulate definite theories about these wild wanderers is, perhaps, natural enough. But the calm, uninquiring confidence with which ideas have been advanced and suggested respecting comets is not so easily explained. One of these ideas, regarded by many as if it were an established truth, I propose now to inquire into,-the idea, namely, that comets have been drawn from those paths on which they chanced

I am quite aware of the fact that the comet really returned in 1759, that is to say, that it was in 1759 that the comet passed its point of nearest approach to the sun. Halley's prediction, however, named 1758, and made as it was when the theory of gravitation was in its babyhood, it was a very fair guess.

originally to approach our solar system, by the perturbing influences of the giant planets, and have thus been, in certain instances, compelled to travel around the sun in elliptical paths, instead of the parabolic or hyperbolic orbits on which they had been traveling before they were thus captured. I think I shall be able, first, to show that this theory is antecedently most unlikely; then to prove that even if it had been the most natural and probable theory conceivable, it is entirely inconsistent with observed facts, and, therefore, untenable. I shall then suggest a theory in its place which, were I to mention it just here, would probably be rejected at once as the wildest speculation imaginable. Possibly, introduced as it will be by a series of observed facts not otherwise explicable, it may not seem so repellent a little further on. But I shall ask the reader interested in matters cometic, not to turn to the end of this essay until he has read the beginning.

We start from the conception that all comets originally entered our solar system from without. They come, say Heis, Schiaparelli, and others, who have advanced the Capture Theory, from out of interstellar space. Now, it is no valid objection to this view that it gives us no idea how cometary matter came to exist in interstellar space, for in all inquiries into the past condition of the celestial bodies we must always come short of their actual origin. Thus, in considering the past of our solar system we may start from a chaotic vaporous state, or from a past condition in the form of cosmical dust, or from a condition in which the vaporous and the dust-like forms are combined; but if we are asked whence came the vapor or the cosmic dust we are obliged to admit that we cannot tell. If, hereafter, we should be able to say that it came from such and such changes in a quantity of various forms of matter, which we may represent by X, Y, and Z, we should still be unable to say how X, Y, and Z came into existence. So that I make no serious exception against the supposed origin of comets on the ground that it really leaves very much to be explained. Interstellar space is a convenient place to which to assign the origin of bodies so mysterious as comets. Cela exprime beaucoup de choses. Almost anything might happen in regions of which we know so little, or, rather, of which we know absolutely nothing.

Yet it may be worth while to remark that, on the whole, the interstellar regions are less likely to be the regions whence

comets originally came to visit suns and sun systems, than to be regions whither comets strayed after leaving originally the neighborhood of solar systems. The most probable idea about the interstellar spaces is that they are the most vacuous regions within the range of the sidereal system. The mere circumstance that comets came from out of them affords no better reason for regarding them as the original home of comets, than the circumstance that comets pass from the solar system into these interstellar spaces affords for rejecting that assumption. There is, in fact, simply no reason whatever for imagining that the place where comets came into existence is the vast unknown region around the solar system which we call interstellar space. Most comets come to us from thence; as many comets are traveling into that unknown region as are coming out of it. To form an opinion about the origin of comets from no better evidence than their last journey (out of millions, very likely) can afford, would be as absurd as for a day-fly to reason that the river flowing past the home of his race came out of the sky because a few drops of rain came thence.

Suppose, however, we admit that in interplanetary space there have been in the past, and still exist, such flights of meteoric matter as the theory we are considering assumes. Let us grant them, also, such motion as may save them from what otherwise would inevitably be their fate, viz., a process of direct indrawing toward the nearest sun, and consequent destruction (with mischief probably to his orb), after a period of time which must be regarded as utterly insignificant compared with the time intervals measuring the duration of a solar system.

It follows, then, that each flight of meteors would, in the long run, draw near some sun, without, however, rushing directly upon him; and, sweeping round his globe upon such path as chanced to result from the combination of its original movement and his attractive influence, would pass out again into interstellar space. This might happen tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times, a comet either sweeping in a long elliptical orbit, with enormous periods of revolution, around one sun; or, if its velocity were slightly greater than that supposition implies, rushing first round one sun, then out into the depths of space to visit another sun, then to yet another, and so on, flitting from sun to sun forever, or until the kind of disturbance in which the holders of the theory we are considering