LECTURE II. 



THE SUN. 



HE subject I have chosen for this Lecture is 

 perhaps an ambitious one ; for it is no less 

 than an attempt to convey to my hearers 

 some faint impression of the vastness and 

 grandeur of the most magnificent object in nature 

 of that glorious body which occupies the centre of our 

 planetary system, and on which not only our own globe, 

 but all the other planets, many of them of far greater 

 magnitude and possibly too of greater importance in 

 the scale of being than our own ; depend in the most 

 immediate manner for the fulfilment of those conditions 

 without which animated existence and organic life are 

 impossible The Sun. There is a poem of Byron's 

 entitled " Darkness," which begins thus : 



** I had a dream which was not all a dream, 

 The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the earth 

 Did wander darkling in th' eternal space 

 Rayless and pathless," 



