Falling Stars and Meteorites. 167 



within the limits of our atmosphere, or when we approach so 

 near them that they suddenly become incandescent, and glow 

 with intense brilliancy for a few brief seconds. 



There is hardly any rational way of escaping from this con- 

 clusion, that all space must be as thickly peopled with these 

 fragments as is the air in a room with particles of dust. When 

 the rays of the sun shine in through a narrow chink, all these 

 minute particles in the course of a ray are made evident, and 

 so these atoms of the dust of space are from time to time seen, 

 not indeed when the sun is shining, but when in the dark but 

 clear nights we watch the heavens, and note all the shining 

 points that shoot out from the blue vault, and seem to disappear 

 as they came. Probably, in the majority of cases, where there 

 is merely this momentary line of brilliant light, the atom has 

 been made bright by the friction produced, and heat evolved 

 in passing through the thin air overhead. Heated intensely, 

 the whole has become dissipated, being either broken up or 

 oxidized into particles quite invisible. In other cases, where 

 the magnitude is greater, the time longer, and the phenomena 

 more marked, a sensible mass of matter is caught up, and 

 though attracted by the earth and approaching its surface, yet 

 fails to reach it, being also broken up into minute fragments of 

 dust by the enormous friction met with before it can reach the 

 actual land and sea. That in their course downwards these 

 masses are occasionally swayed about, taking a zigzag or irre- 

 gular path, seems certain, and now and then the actual broken 

 fragments are seen to approach the earth, though they cannot 

 be picked up on the spot where they appeared to fall. Now 

 and then, however, a giant appears — a Triton among these 

 minnows of the sky ; molten on the surface by the friction, it 

 yet succeeds in retaining its natural state, until at last it falls to 

 the earth a solid, though rarely in an unbroken state. Masses 

 of magnetic iron and nickel, with occasionally other metals, 

 masses of sandstone, mixed masses of metal and sandstone, have 

 all been picked up on the earth after falling from the sky, and 

 have been examined by competent chemists. They are the ma- 

 terials that people space ; they are fragments of matter widely, 

 and perhaps universally, distributed; they are materials collected 

 or left behind by the wild comets in their course; they may be tho 

 food of the sun, the fuel conveyed in some mysterious manner 

 to keep up that vast burning mass that is the source of light 

 and heat, whose rays give life, and of whose atmosphere we are 

 now beginning to learn something from the experiments 

 recently made on light. And these materials accord pretty well 

 with those common on the earth. They afford no new metal or 

 mineral. They are combinations not unknown, if not common, 

 of very familiar ingredients. 



