In its fearful career the meteor is often rent to fragments, reduced to dust, dissolved into vapor. The glowing atoms of the wreck lie strewn along the path, just as the ghastly remnants of Napoleon’s mighty army limned out the awful retreat from Moscow. A pencil-shaped cloud of meteoric débris, perhaps eighty or a hundred miles in length, and four or five miles in diameter, thus hangs poised in air. It is at night. The sun has sunk so far below the horizon that there is no trace of the feeblest twilight glow. An ordinary cloud would, of course, be invisible except as concealing the stars; no beams of light fall upon it; there is nothing to render it luminous. So, too, the meteoric streak will often pass instantly into invisibility, but, as I have said, this is not always the case. There is a well-authenticated instance in which the trail of a superb meteor remained visible for nearly an hour. I have endeavored up to the present to explain the various phenomena presented to us in the fall of a meteor, but here, for the first time, we have to note a circumstance for which it is not easy to account. We can explain why it is that the long meteoric cloud should be there, but we can not so easily explain why we should be able to see it. Whence comes this beautiful pearly luminosity? It seems that the meteoric dust must glow with some intrinsic luminosity. We have spoken of dazzling fire-balls which generate for a brief moment a light which eye-witnesses, with possibly a pardonable exaggeration, have ventured to compare with the beams of the sun himself. Other meteors are described as being as bright as the full moon. Descending still lower in the scale of splendor, we read of fire-balls as bright as Venus or Jupiter, as bright as Sirius, or as a star of the first magnitude. With each step downward in brilliancy we find the meteors to increase in numerical abundance. Shooting stars as bright as the stars of the second or third magnitude are comparatively frequent; they are still more numerous of the fourth and fifth magnitudes. Every night brings its tale of shooting stars whose brightness is just sufficient to impress the unaided eye. Nor do the shooting stars which even the most attentive eye can detect represent a fraction of their entire number. As there are telescopic stars which the unaided eye can not see, so it might fairly be conjectured that, as we can trace meteors of successive stages of brightness down to the limit of unaided eye visibility, so there may be meteors still and still smaller which would be detected could we only direct a telescope toward them. If we reflect that for every one that is seen there must be thousands which dart in unseen, we obtain an imposing idea of the myriads of shooting stars that daily rain in upon our globe.