Between ten and fifteen years ago it happened that several well-known observers, employed in telescopic examination of the sun and moon, reported that from time to time they had seen small dark bodies, sometimes singly, sometimes in numbers, in passage across the discs of the luminaries. It was concluded that these were meteors moving in space beyond the atmosphere of the earth. The bodies were called "dark meteors," to emphasise the fact that they were seen in their natural condition, and not in that momentary one in which they had hitherto been always seen; _i.e._ when heated to white heat, and rapidly vaporised, in the course of their passage through the upper regions of our air. This "discovery" gave promise of such assistance to meteor theories, that calculations were made from the directions in which they had been seen to travel, and the speeds at which they had moved, in the hope that some information concerning their orbits might be revealed. But after a while some doubt began to be thrown upon their being really meteors, and eventually an Australian observer solved the mystery. He found that they were merely tiny particles of dust, or of the black coating on the inner part of the tube of the telescope, becoming detached from the sides of the eye-piece and falling across the field of view. He was led to this conclusion by having noted that a gentle tapping of his instrument produced the "dark" bodies in great numbers! Thus the opportunity of observing meteors beyond our atmosphere had once more failed.