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I suppose all parts of your globe are by this time well populated, and how can you be entirely free from trouble when you are living in constant danger of the downfall of these great masses of rock?" "But we don't have meteorites now," replied Thorwald. "Oh, you don't?" "No, they ceased falling long ago. Mars is going slow enough for the present."
In that case it would have been less retarded by the resistance of the atmosphere than are meteorites which enter the air at a lower angle and shoot ahead hundreds of miles until friction has nearly destroyed their original motion when they drop upon the earth.
"And still," quickly responded Thorwald, "the discovery of diamonds in meteorites was a valuable link in the chain of evidence which you are putting together. Keep on with your investigations. Some time positive knowledge will come to you as it has come to us. But let me appeal once more to your reason.
Possibly one of the greater fragments may gain in mass by attracting to itself the nearer fragments, and thus continue to wax until it shall have swept clean the whole pathway of the planetary matter, except such small fragments as may after æons of time continue to fall upon the master body, as our meteorites now at intervals rush into our atmosphere and sometimes reach the earth.
When he was informed about the mysterious fireball he heaved an audible sigh of relief, "Thanks," he said, "I was afraid I'd gotten some bad bourbon." And he hung up. Dr. Lincoln La Paz, world-famous authority on meteorites and head of the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics, apparently took the occurrence calmly.
Shooting-stars, on the contrary, are entirely exempt from such limitations. The Yale Professor concluded "that the larger meteorites moving in our solar system are allied much more closely with the group of comets of short period than with the comets whose orbits are nearly parabolic." They would thus seem to be more at home than might have been expected amid the planetary family.
That the spectacle spoken of in the chronicle was caused by meteorites he deems exceedingly probable because of what is said about ``a great noise; meteorites are the only celestial phenomena attended with perceptible sounds.
Hundreds of meteorites, ignited by the friction of the atmosphere, irradiated the shadow of the luminous train, and lined the cloudy parts of the disc with their fire. At this period the earth was in its perihelion, and the month of December is so propitious to these shooting stars, that astronomers have counted as many as twenty-four thousand in an hour.
Slowly the Lavender Ray swung through the ether, followed by its millions of meteorites, dipping downward toward the northern side of the valley and sinking ever lower and lower toward the cliff. Bennie threw himself flat on his stomach upon the ridge, pressing his hands to his ears, and the others, feeling that something terrible was going to happen, followed his example.
Professor Pickering conjectures that this supposed flock of great meteorites may have formed the nucleus of a comet which struck the earth, and he finds confirmation of the idea in the fact that out of the ten largest meteorites known, no less than seven were found within nine hundred miles of Coon Butte.
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