Meteorites and What they Teach us. — Ilensoldt. 31 
but we may look upon it as an established fact that it con- 
stantly gains in weight and that in proportion to such gain its 
attractive power steadily increases. The attracting force of 
the sun is so enormous that a perpetual hail of meteorites and 
a torrent of dust-particles must rush upon it from all direc- 
tions, and some of the foremost observers are now of opinion 
that these falling bodies are the sole cause of the sun's heat. 
In the light of this theory our earth is a young and growing, 
not an old and dying planet, a planet with a future, which 
ought to be cheerful news to all of us although we shall not 
live to reap the benefit of it, and the sun, far from being on its 
last legs as an expiring luminary is steadily gaining in heat 
and lighting capacity. 
Now in how far do the facts revealed as yet by the study of 
meteorites support this hypothesis and what do meteorites 
teach us in reference to the character of our own planet? That 
an accumulation of cosmical particles, no matter how small, 
is in itself sufficient to account for the origin of planetary 
masses or fixed stars, no matter how large, nobody can deny 
after a moment's reflection ; it is merely a matter of time for 
any given body to attain any given size, and if the accumula- 
tion is at first extremely slow it must not be forgotten that it 
increases enormously with the growth of the mass. 
But since the internal structure of meteorites, and especially 
that of the so-called stone-meteorites, has been more carefully 
studied, additional evidence has been furnished which almost 
amounts to proof that at least many of the meteorites now in 
our museums and private collections have originated from the 
accumulation of small particles in the manner above described. 
Gustav Rose of Berlin, one of the most careful observers, and 
whose classification of meteorites is now adopted even by the 
great Tschermak, the meteorite-investigator par excellence, 
Gustav Rose was the first to draw attention to the fact that 
the majority of the stone-meteorites as yet discovered, are 
composed of little spheres or "chondri," globular masses, vary- 
ing in diameter from the merest dust to that of a walnut. He 
proposed the name of chondrites for such masses, but they 
form a class so great in proportion to the rest of the recorded 
stone-meteorites that Tschermak found it necessary to sub- 
divide them into more than half a dozen varieties or species. 
This chondritic structure is different from anything Ave find in 
