ne that manages to come to earth there must be hundreds seen only as
shooting stars, which vanish and 'leave not a wrack behind.' When a
meteor is seen to fall it is traced, and, whenever possible, it is found
and placed in a museum. Men have sometimes come across large masses of
stone and iron with their surfaces fused with heat. These are in every
way like the recognized meteorites, except that no eye has noted their
advent. As there can be no reasonable doubt that they are of the same
origin as the others, they too are collected and placed in museums, and
in any large museum you would be able to see both kinds--those which
have been seen to come to earth and those which have been found
accidentally.

The meteors which appear very brilliant in their course across the sky
are sometimes called fire-balls, which is only another name for the same
thing. Some of these are brighter than the full moon, so bright that
they cause objects on earth to cast a shadow. In 1803 a fiery ball was
noticed above a small town in Normandy; it burst and scattered stones
far and wide, but luckily no one was hurt. The largest meteorites that
have been found on the earth are a ton or more in weight; others are
mere stones; and others again just dust that floats about in the
atmosphere before gently settling. Of course, meteors of this last kind
could not be seen to fall like the larger ones, yet they do fall in such
numbers that calculations have been made showing that the earth must
catch about a hundred millions of meteors daily, having altogether a
total weight of about a hundred tons. This sounds enormous, but
compared with the weight of the earth it is very small indeed.

Now that we have arrived at the fact that strange bodies do come
hurtling down upon us out of space, and that we can actually handle and
examine them, the next question is, Where do they come from? At one time
it was thought that they were fragments which had been flung off by the
earth herself when she was subject to violent explosions, and that they
had been thrown far enough to resist the impulse to drop down upon her
again, and had been circling round the sun ever since, until the earth
came in contact with them again and they had fallen back upon her. It is
not difficult to imagine a force which would be powerful enough to
achieve the feat of speeding something off at such a velocity that it
passed beyond the earth's power to pull it back, but nothing that we
have