11 
meteor swarms, due to gravity.” Now meteorites are the only 
tangible connection we have with ‘‘ Cosmos”’ or infinite space; we 
know they are fragments, messengers if you will, from other worlds 
than ours, and though few survive the rush through the earth's 
atmosphere, yet a certain proportion reach the surface urdissolved 
or unvaporized, and can be submitted to chemical analysis. For 
more than twenty years comets have been held to be clusters of 
incandescent meteorites rendered luminous by collisions, and we all 
know that the earth passes through two closed rings of meteors 
every August and Noyember, but we have now to grasp the idea 
that infinite space is packed with meteors in unimaginable numbers, 
flying about with immense velocity in all directions. To quote Mr. 
Lockyer: It is well known that observations of falling stars have 
been used to determine roughly the average number of meteorites 
which fall on the earth each 24 hours; and having this datum to 
determine the average distance apart between the meteorites in 
those parts of space which are traversed by the earth as a member 
of the solar system. Dr. Schmidt, of Athens, from observations 
made during 17 years, found that the mean hourly number of 
luminous meteors visible on a clear moonless night by one observer 
was 14, taking the time of observation from midnight to 1 a.m. 
«Tt has been further experimentally shown that a large group 
of observers who might include the whole hemisphere in their 
observations would see about six times as many as are visible to one 
eye. Professor H. A. Newton and others have calculated that, 
making all proper corrections, the number which might be visible 
over the whole earth would be a little greater than 10,000 times 
as many as could be seen at one place. From this we gather that 
no less than 20 millions of luminous meteors fall upon our planet 
daily, each of which in a dark clear night would present us with 
the well-known phenomenon of a shooting star. 
«This number, however, by no means represents the total num- 
ber of minute meteorites that enter our atmosphere, because many 
entirely invisible to the naked eye are often seen in telescopes. It 
has been suggested that the number of meteroites, if these were 
included, would be increased at least twenty-fold; this would give 
us 400 millions of meteorites falling on the earth’s surface daily. 
If we consider, however, only those visible to the naked eye, and if 
we assume that the absolute velocity of the meteors in space is 
equal to that of comets moving in parabolic orbits, Professor H. A. 
Newton has shown that the average number of meteorites in the 
space that the earth traverses is (in each volume equal to the earth) 
about 30,000. This gives us a result in round numbers that the 
—. are distributed each 250 miles away from its neigh- 
ours. 
