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 by any one missile a number must on the average be projected, which is five thousand times as great as that already named.

We thus see that the improbability that a body shot from a volcano situated on a globe at the same distance as Alpha Centauri, should ever fall on the earth as a meteorite, must be twenty-five hundred of millions of millions to one. Surely this presents in a very forcible light the extreme improbability that meteorites should have been derived in the way this doctrine suggests. Of course if the volcano were so much further off as to have a distance comparable with that of most of the stars whose distance is known, then the improbability would be still more enhanced. But taking the figures as they stand, it would appear that even if there were at least two thousand million volcanoes, launching forth missiles into space, not more than one out of every million bodies thus projected could ever cross the earth's track, and thus conceivably reach the earth as a meteorite.

It will also be observed that in this calculation I have regarded the earth's track as placed squarely to the line of fire. If it were more or less edgewise, as would of course generally be the case, then the length of the projected track would be correspondingly reduced, and the improbability would be correspondingly increased. From all these considerations I have come to the conclusion that we may reject any hypothesis which would ask us to derive the meteorites from volcanic sources in the stellar spaces. The actual source from which they seem to have come will be considered in the next chapter.