The earliest step in the study, which has now been going on for many years, was to analyze the meteorite, and the first result was that it contained no elements not found on this planet. The next was that, though none of these elements were unknown, they were not combined as we see them in the minerals we dig from the earth. Next it was found that the combinations, if unfamiliar at the earth’s surface and nowhere reproduced exactly, were at least very like such as existed down beneath it, in lower strata, as far as we can judge by specimens of the earth’s interior cast up from volcanoes. Later, a resemblance was recognized in the elements of the meteorites to those found by the spectroscope in shooting stars, though the spectroscopic observation of the latter is too difficult to have even yet proceeded very far. And now, within the last few years, we seem to be coming near to a surprising solution. It has now been shown that meteoric stones sometimes contain pieces of essentially different rocks fused together, and pieces of detritus,--the wearing down of older rocks. Thus, as we know that sandstone is made of compacted sand, and sand itself was in some still earlier time part of rocks worn down by friction,--when it is shown, as it has been by M. Meunier, that a sandstone penetrated by metallic threads (like some of our terrestrial formations) has come to us in a meteorite, the conclusion that these stones may be part of some old world is one that, however startling, we cannot refuse at least to consider. According to this view, there may have been a considerable planet near the earth, which, having reached the last stage of planetary existence shown in the case of our present moon, went one step further,--went, that is, out of existence altogether, by literal breaking up and final disappearance. We have seen the actual moon scarred and torn in every direction, and are asked to admit the possibility that a continuance of the process on a similar body has broken it up into the fragments that come to us. We do not say that this is the case, but that (as regards the origin of some of the meteorites at least) we cannot at present disprove it. We may, at any rate, present to the novelist seeking a new _motif_ that of a meteorite bringing to us the story of a lost race, in some fragment of art or architecture of its lost world!