chances of their encountering the earth would be small. Both these theories are now discarded. It is believed that the meteors are merely lesser fragments of the same kind of materials as the planets, circling independently round the sun; and a proof of this is that far more meteorites fall on that part of the earth which is facing forward in its journey than on that behind, and this is what we should expect if the meteors were scattered independently through space and it was by reason of our movements that we came in contact with them. There is no need to explain this further. Everyone knows that in cycling or driving along a road where there is a good deal of traffic both ways the people we meet are more in number than those who overtake us, and the same result would follow with the meteors; that is to say, in travelling through space where they were fairly evenly distributed we should meet more than we should be overtaken by. You remember that it was suggested the sun's fuel might be obtained from meteors, and this was proved to be not possible, even though there are no doubt unknown millions of these strange bodies circling throughout the solar system. There are so many names for these flashing bodies that we may get a little confused: when they are seen in the sky they are meteors, or fire-balls; when they reach the earth they are called meteorites, and also aerolites. Then there is another class of the same bodies called shooting stars, and these are in reality only meteors on a smaller scale; but there ought to be no confusion in our thoughts, for all these objects are small bodies travelling round the sun, and caught by the earth's influence. When you watch the sky for some time on a clear night, you will seldom fail to see at least one star flash out suddenly in a path of thrilling light and disappear, and you cannot be certain whether that star had been shining in the sky a minute before, or if it had appeared suddenly only in order to go out. The last idea is right. We must get rid at once of the notion that it would be possible for any fixed star to behave in this manner. To begin with, the fixed stars are many of them actually travelling at a great velocity at present, yet so immeasurably distant are they that their movement makes no perceptible difference to us. For one of them to appear to dash across the heavens as a meteor does would mean a velocity entirely unknown to us, even comparing it with the speed of light. No, these shooting stars are not stars at all, though they were so named, long before the real motions of the fixed stars were even dimly guessed at. As we have seen, they belong to the same class as meteors.