“And this air it is which has ultimately compassed my destruction. So long as I merely passed near your earth, but kept clear of that deadly net which you have spread, in the shape of your atmosphere, to entrap the shooting stars, all went well with me. I felt the ponderous mass of the earth, and I swerved a little in compliance with its attraction; but my supreme velocity preserved me, and I hurried past unscathed. I had many narrow escapes from capture during the lapse of those countless ages in which I have been wandering through space. But at last I approached once too often to the earth. On this fatal occasion my course led me to graze your globe so closely that I could not get by without traversing the higher parts of the atmosphere. Accordingly, a frightful catastrophe immediately occurred. Not to you; it did you no harm; indeed, quite the contrary. My dissolution gave you a pleasing and instructive exhibition. It was then, for the first time, that you were permitted to see me, and you called me a shooting star or a meteor. “When from the freedom of open space I darted into the atmosphere, I rubbed past every particle of air which I touched in my impetuous flight, and in doing so I experienced the usual consequence of friction—I was warmed by the operation. “You can readily comprehend the immense quantity of heat that will have been produced ere friction could deprive me of a speed of twenty miles a second. That heat not merely warmed me, but I rapidly became red-hot, white-hot, then I melted, even though composed of materials of a most refractory kind. Still friction had much more to do, and it actually drove me off into vapor, and I vanished. You, standing on your earth many miles below, never saw me—never could have seen me—until this supreme moment, when, glowing with an instantaneous fervor, I for a brief second became visible. “Nature knows no annihilation, and though I had been driven off into vapor and the trial by fire had scattered and dispersed me, yet in the lofty heights of the atmosphere those vapors cooled and condensed. They did not, they never could again reunite and reproduce my pristine structure. Here and there in wide diffusion I repassed from the vaporous to the solid form, and in this state I wore the appearance of a streak of minute granules distributed all along the highway I had followed. These granules gradually subsided through the air to the earth. On Alpine snows, far removed from the haunts of men and from contamination of chimneys, minute particles have been gathered, many of which have unquestionably been derived from the scattered remains of shooting stars. Into the sea similar particles are forever falling, and they have been subsequently dredged up from profound depths, having subsided through an ocean of water after sinking through an ocean of air.”