Professor Nordenskjöld has for many years been a close observer of dust of all kinds that has fallen upon the earth in rain or snow; and it was his good fortune, during the expedition of the “Vega,” to prove beyond a doubt the presence of cosmic dust. For many years we have been assured by astronomers that the earth was being bombarded, as it were, continually, by innumerable meteors. The moment they enter our domain, we observe the spectacle of their ignition. In a moment they are reduced to ashes, and the fine impalpable dust drops slowly, an invisible shower, upon the earth. When such showers are intensified, it is not impossible that some outward and visible phenomena may be the result. In the search for this cosmic dust, the far North, where the surface is covered by an almost continuous coating of snow and ice, offers a wide and promising field for investigation. Here no other dust prevails. Professor Nordenskjöld first found cosmic dust in the North at Spitzbergen. The second discovery, off the Taimar coast, seemed to be in the form of yellow specks lying on the snow. They were at first supposed to be diatomaceous ooze;[49] but when placed in the hands of Dr. Kjellman, he pronounced them to be pale yellow crystals, and, curious enough, formed of carbonate of lime. “The original composition and origin of this substance,” says Professor Nordenskjöld, “appears to me exceedingly enigmatical. It was not carbonate of lime, for the crystals were rhomboidal, and did not show the cleavage of calcite. Nor can there be a question of its being arragonite, because this mineral might indeed fall asunder of itself; but in that case the newly formed powder ought to be crystalline. Have the crystals originally been a new hydrated carbonate of lime formed by crystallizing out at a temperature of ten or twenty degrees above the freezing point? In such case they ought not to have been found on the surface of the _snow_, but lower, on the surface of the _ice_. Or have they fallen down from the inter-planetary spaces to the surface of the earth, and before crumbling down have had a composition differing from terrestrial substances, in the same way as various chemical compounds found in recent times in meteoric stones? The occurrence of the crystals in the uppermost layer of snow, and their falling asunder in the air, tell in favor of this view. Unfortunately there is no possibility of settling these questions; but at all events this discovery is a further incitement to those who travel in the high North, to collect with extreme care, from snow-fields lying far from the ordinary routes of communication, all foreign substances, though apparently of trifling importance.”