According to Flammarion regarding the possibility of meteoric fragments coming to our planet from an ancient satellite of the earth which was shattered to pieces, the germs shut up in the interior of the meteorite would remain in a kind of lethargic sleep without losing any of their germinative qualities during their plunge through interplanetary space. In fact, the author lends a seductive air of plausibility to the myth, suggesting that the fragments would reach our planet fresh and cold, to be again rejuvenated and come to life, but even Flammarion is compelled to acknowledge that we have found nothing to prove such a theory true. But if this new theory should be accepted, as my father wrote in 1871, “we have reason to regard with apprehension the too close approach of one of these visitants; because, if one meteor supplied the seeds of the living things now existing on the world, another may supply myriads of seeds of undesirable living things; and perhaps the sequent struggle for life may result in the survival of the fittest.” It may seem superfluous to add that, in a collision by which a world was shivered into fragments, the seeds of life would have what may be described as a warm time, since the collision could hardly fail to vaporize the destroyed world. The fiery heat generated by the collision, followed by a voyage during myriads of millions of ages through the inconceivable cold of space, and the effect of the fierce heat which accompanies the fall of meteoric masses upon our earth, would seem so unfavorable to the germs of life that we may accept with confidence the belief that all such germs had been completely destroyed before reaching this planet. Arrhenius reversing the seed-bearing-meteor theory in connection with a meteorite bringing the seeds of life to our planet, makes a neat calculation showing the time which would be required for a tiny particle, drawn from our planet and hurled into space, to arrive at the surface of a planet circling around the star Alpha in the constellation of the Centaur. It would be twenty days on its way to Mars (traveling at the usual rate of speed assigned to meteors, _viz._, some twenty-six miles a second.) A year would elapse before it reached the outermost planet Neptune, which travels on the confines of the solar system, and some nine thousand years ere it plunged through the atmosphere surrounding a planet circling round the nearest star, and finally crashed on its surface. Endless are the speculations which might thus be indulged in regarding the celestial voyages of meteors through interplanetary space, but though the misguided ones which have rashly ventured too near our planet have been trapped in its atmosphere, landing on its surface before suffering complete annihilation, have been weighed, measured, and tested by chemical analysis, the past history of their excursions into space is enshrouded in a mysterious silence as unbroken as that of the Sphinx.[14] [Illustration: