It is believed that these meteors are fragments which, ages ago, were shot out from now extinct volcanoes, with so great a velocity that they were thrown out beyond the attraction of the earth, and so becoming individual planets or heavenly bodies for the time being. Such being the case, they have traveled in independent orbits, until they at last encountered the earth at a point where her orbit crosses theirs. It may also be possible that these meteors were thrown from the planets or the stars, and as meteoric showers occur at intervals of thirty-three to thirty-four years, it is often believed that they are connected with comets and that therefore the comets, too, must be solid bodies like our earth. The number of meteors falling upon the earth adds continuously to the earth’s mass at a rate of about forty thousand tons per year. Our earth is older than five hundred million years, according to Prof. Morean of Bourges Observatory, France, who holds that for half of that time, two hundred and fifty million years, some form of life has existed on its surface. Man, however, can boast of only some ten thousand years of ancestry in direct lines. In other words, in the life of this little globe he is, even in his most primitive form, a very recent arrival. The earth was once a hot gaseous mass like the sun. Gradually the surface cooled, condensation took place forming the lakes and seas and after a great period of time vegetation appeared. Water, entering the bowels of the earth, through cracks or some such opening in the surface, would evaporate into steam and under high pressure break through the earth crust and create a volcano, carrying with it great masses of molten rock. The hot geysers of Yellowstone Park, in America, are similar examples of such internal action. In historic times there were lakes in the Sahara Desert and the so-called “Hopeless Desert” lying in the Rocky Mountains of North America, while in the Sierra Nevadas there was a time, not more than a million years ago, when all of the territory was well watered and vegetated. One of these lakes, in western Utah and extending over into Nevada, was one hundred and seventy-five miles wide, two hundred and fifty miles long and in places over a thousand feet in depth. Other evidences of this phenomenon, of tremendous masses of water entering into the bowels of the earth, are found particularly in the many caves among the Pyrenees and in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, the largest cavern in the world, in the upper galleries of which can still be seen the perforations through which the waters descended. As we descend into the earth we observe an increase in temperature of one degree Fahrenheit for every fifty feet. At a depth of ten or twelve miles the earth is red hot. At a depth of a hundred miles the temperature is so great that if at the surface of the earth it would liquefy all solid matter.