490 ' Proceedings of the Boy at Society 
from our furnaces, locomotives, the ashes of our grates, and in the 
case of the ocean, from steamers. All our materials of combustion 
furnish considerable quantities of iron dust, and it would not be 
astonishing to find that this, after having been transported by the 
winds, should again fall on the surface of the earth at great dis- 
tances from its source. 
Such are the objections which present themselves when it is pro- 
posed to pronounce upon the origin of particles which we are 
inclined to regard as cosmic, and of which we propose here to give 
a short description. We shall see that many of these doubts are at 
once removed by a statement of the circumstances under which 
cosmic spherules are found in deep sea deposits, and it will be found 
also that all the objections are disposed of when we show the asso- 
ciation of metallic spherules with the most characteristic bodies of 
undoubted meteorites. 
In the first place, the considerable distance from land at which 
we find cosmic particles in greatest abundance in deep sea deposits, 
eliminates at once objections which might be raised with respect to 
metallic particles found in the neighbourhood of inhabited countries. 
On the other hand, the form and character of the spherules of extra- 
terrestrial origin are essentially different from those collected near 
manufacturing centres. These magnetic spherules have never 
elongated necks or a cracked surface like those derived from 
furnaces with which we have carefully compared them. Neither 
are the magnetic spherules with a metallic centre comparable either 
in their form or structure to those particles of native iron which 
have been described in the eruptive rocks, especially in the basaltic 
rocks of the north of Ireland, of Iceland, &c. 
Having referred to the objections, let us now see on what we 
must rely, in support of the hypothesis that many of the magnetic 
particles from the bottom of the sea which are specially abundant 
in those regions where the rate of accumulation of the deposit is 
exceedingly slow, are of cosmic origin. If we plunge a magnet 
into an oceanic deposit, specially a red clay from the central parts 
of the Pacific, we extract particles, some of which are magnetite 
from volcanic rocks, and to which vitreous matters are often 
attached; others again are quite isolated, and differ in most of their 
properties from the former. The latter are generally round, 
