on earth would be nearly strong enough to achieve such a feat.
Imaginative writers have pictured a projectile hurled from a cannon's
mouth with such tremendous force that it not only passed beyond the
range of the earth's power to pull it back, but so that it fell within
the influence of the moon and was precipitated on to her surface! Such
things must remain achievements in imagination only; it is not possible
for them to be carried out. Other ideas as to the origin of meteors
were that they had been expelled from the moon or from the sun. It would
need a much less force to send a projectile away from the moon than from
the earth on account of its smaller size and less density, but the
distance from the earth to the moon is not very great, and any
projectile hurled forth from the moon would cross it in a comparatively
short time. Therefore if the meteorites come from the moon, the moon
must be expelling them still, and we might expect to see some evidence
of it; but we know that the moon is a dead world, so this explanation is
not possible. The sun, for its part, is torn by such gigantic
disturbances that, notwithstanding its vast size, there is no doubt
sufficient force there to send meteors even so far as the earth, but the
chances of their encountering the earth would be small. Both these
theories are now discarded. It is believed that the meteors are merely
lesser fragments of the same kind of materials as the planets, circling
independently round the sun; and a proof of this is that far more
meteorites fall on that part of the earth which is facing forward in its
journey than on that behind, and this is what we should expect if the
meteors were scattered independently through space and it was by reason
of our movements that we came in contact with them. There is no need to
explain this further. Everyone knows that in cycling or driving along a
road where there is a good deal of traffic both ways the people we meet
are more in number than those who overtake us, and the same result would
follow with the meteors; that is to say, in travelling through space
where they were fairly evenly distributed we should meet more than we
should be overtaken by.

You remember that it was suggested the sun's fuel might be obtained from
meteors, and this was proved to be not possible, even though there are
no doubt unknown millions of these strange bodies circling throughout
the solar system.

There are so many names for these fla