When we realize that without the sun’s heat and light we ourselves could not here exist; that it has power to lift the waters that are unfit for man’s use and restore them again in a purified state; and power to produce food for him both in the animal and vegetable kingdom, the truth is not lessened. Were the sun nearer the earth or farther away all life would here be destroyed; and should any one of all the suns in space vary the least in its orbit it would be the destruction of earth. Yet as far as we have learned no sun has ever come within twenty trillions of miles to interfere with our globe, and from all the above facts we may well believe there are truths concerning the sun’s light and heat that we do not yet understand. That the ocean keeps up its supply of radiation, and as far as we see never diminishes; that the heat from volcanoes and all other fires of earth does not escape from earth’s hold, but is returned in new forms to be used again; leads us to question whether earth’s heat passes beyond its own atmosphere. The heat of our great solar light may likewise be equal to that of Adam’s day and continue thus unwasted until the end of time, or until its great Author sees fit to change it. While astronomers tell us that the diminution of the sun’s diameter 1/10,000 part would liberate heat enough to supply its current expenditure for about 2,000 years, they have also shown that it could be supplied by the friction meteors would cause by rushing into the sun; provided that the number falling into it in one year equalled the moon’s volume.[18] We can know little of the number there may be, for only that they occasionally fall into our atmosphere and are instantly burned, we should not know of their existence. But it is said that every 33 years we pass through a shoal of them 100,000 miles broad, and many thousand times greater in length, and that it has been thus for centuries. Prof. Newton estimates the average number of meteors that traverse our atmosphere daily, large enough to be visible to the eye on a dark night, is 7,500,000. With the telescope-meteors added, the number is increased to 400 millions. As the sun is more than a million times the size of the earth should the number falling into it be increased at the same rate it might reach 150 quadrillions daily, 170,000 falling on every square mile of the sun’s surface.