SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 47 
is dissipated by its self-evolved heat, that its vapors mingle with 
the air and its ashes settle to the earth. 
Our world is thereby made 1-84 of a pound heavier! 
Take this as an average, and the 20 millon shooting stars per 
day make the earth 125 tons heavier. ‘This daily addition 
amounts to 45000 tons yearly. 
How much will this increase the earth’s size? Allow that all 
this meteoric matter, 45000 tons annually, finally settles to the 
earth’s surface in a continuous layer of uniform depth; and 
that, like some common earth, a cubie foot of it weighs 80 
pounds. Having the earth’s radius, 3959 miles, we find its sur- 
face area is more than 5000 million million square feet. If coy- 
ered with meteoric matter one inch deep, the weight on each 
square foot would be 1-12 of 80 pounds — 6 2-3 pounds. On 
the entire surface there would rest a weight of 33 1-3 thousand 
million pounds, or 16 2-3 million million tons. This is 370 mil- 
lion, times 45000 tons, the yearly deposit. 
That is, in 370 million years this accumulating shooting star 
dust will form on the earth’s surface a layer one inch deep! 
That 45000 tons of matter added to our earth every year for 
370 million years would raise the level of its surface only one 
inch, may well expand our conception of the vastness of our 
earth. 
We have seen, too, that one shooting star evolved 4477 units 
of heat. At that rate, 20 million daily bring us over 8914 
thousand million heat units, and in a year, over 32 million mil- 
hon units of heat. 
Uniformly distributed, how much heat is this to each of the 
5000 million millon square feet of the earth’s surface? 
20 62 
° 
OL > 
- — fa heat 
“00 = L000M Ce ee 
Evidently, to each square foot only 
unit. 
Contrast this with the heat we receive from the Sun. 
Skillful experiments prove that the Sun sends to each square 
foot of the earth’s surface on which it shines an average of 11 
. = ‘) \ 
heat units per minute, or aaa of a unit per second, or 
110 183 , ee 
a € é =I K(0) rg en _ That is ’ 
6000 ~ 1000 of a heat unit in 1-10 of asecond. That is, we 
receive from the Sun in 1-10 of a second nearly three times as 
much heat as is brought to us by myriads of intensely heated 
shooting stars in an entire year! The contrast serves to quicken 
our realization of the Sun’s dominance in the support of ter- 
restrial life by its constant, incomparable yield of heat. 
