in 1846, it astonished its watchers by suddenly splitting in two. The
two comets thus formed out of one separated to a distance of about one
hundred and sixty thousand miles, and then raced side by side,
sometimes with a curious ligature connecting them, like Siamese twins,
until they disappeared together in interplanetary space. In 1852 they
came back, still nearly side by side, but now the distance between
them had increased to a million and a quarter of miles. After that, at
every recurrence of their period, astronomers looked for them in vain,
until 1872, when an amazing thing happened. On the night of November
28th, when the earth was crossing the plane of the orbit of the
missing comet, a brilliant shower of meteors burst from the northern
sky, traveling nearly in the track which the comet should have
pursued. The astronomers were electrified. Klinkerfues, of Göttingen,
telegraphed to Pogson, of Madras: ``Biela touched earth; search near
Theta Centauri.'' Pogson searched in the place indicated and saw a
cometary mass retreating into the southern heavens, where it was soon
swallowed from sight!

Since then the Biela meteors have been among the recognized periodic
spectacles of the sky, and few if any doubt that they represent a
portion of the missing comet whose disintegration began with the
separation into two parts in 1846. The comet itself has never since
been seen. The first display of these meteors, sometimes called the
``Andromedes,'' because they radiate from the constellation Andromeda,
was remarkable for the great brilliancy of many of the fire-balls that
shot among the shower of smaller sparks, some of which were described
as equaling the full moon in size. None of them is known to have
reached the earth, but during the display of the same meteors in 1885
a meteoric mass fell at Mazapil in Northern Mexico (it is now in the
Museum at Vienna), which many have thought may actually be a piece of