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COMETS AND METEORIC BODIES

der its expansion, it begins by flying off in all directions, especially toward the sun. It condenses into very minute particles, which are acted upon by the sun's rays and thus tlirown in the direction away from the sun. That the tail of the comet was produced by a repulsion like this has been evident ever since observations were made, but not until Maxwell's law was understood could any explanation be given of the seeming repulsion of the matter of the tail by the sun.

The explanations of the other phenomena we have mentioned are not yet so simple and satisfactory that they may be clearly stated in a short space. The reader who is interested in the subject must therefore be referred to special papers and treatises.[1]

  1. ↑ The papers to which the present writer is principally indebted for the views in question are by Prof. J. J. Thompson, in the Popular Science Monthly for August, 1901, and to the article by Prof. John Cox in the number for January, 1902. These papers again set forth the investigations of Arrhenius, the Swedish physicist, who seems to have made the most successful endeavour to explain the phenomena in question on the principles which we have mentioned.
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