19 
much towards settling the difficult question of the nature of the corona 
and red flames and prominences which seem to surround the body 
of the sun during a total eclipse. Of course the same absorbing 
interest is not felt in solar eclipses since Mr. Huggins discovered 
his ingenious device for taking spectroscopic observations of the 
Corona, etc., without the aid of a total eclipse—in fact at any 
time when the atmosphere is clear. Thus the sun has been 
photographed 205 times during the year in England, and by inter- 
lopating the pictures obtained in India, the number is made up to 
360. 
We all know the corona is the pale pinkish-white light seen 
during a total eclipse to surround the body of the sun to a distance 
of some 10 millions ot miles. The whole globe of the sun is also 
known to be enveloped to a breadth of 50,000 miles, in an atmos- 
phere of lambent glowing flames of incandescent hydrogen, through 
which red fountain-like jets of flame are seen to shoot to distances 
relatively short, but sometimes reaching a height of 300,000 miles. 
These red jets are now found to occur only on that portion of the 
sun’s disc which corresponds to our sub-tropical zones, and on 
which alone sun spots are ever seen; hence it is called the sun- 
spot zone. Mr. Proctor has a new and most fascinating theory as 
to these sun-spots (many of them large enough to swallow up 
thousands of our worlds) and the jets seen on the same zone. He 
considers them as evidence of stupendous volcanic action in the 
sun, during which these red jets of denser material are shot out 
from his surface with a velocity of some 350 to 500 miles a second, 
sufficient, he calculates, to carry them beyond the influence of the 
sun’s attraction into spcce, where they are now revolving in some 
other stellar system as meteoric bodies. We pass through a thick 
belt of such meteors each November, not to mention the millions 
of shooting stars we encounter at other times. It is, of course, 
the friction caused by the rapid transit through our atmosphere 
* which ignites them and causes them to glow with such brilliancy. 
All the other suns which people space are probably, like our own, 
in a state of violent volcanic activity and shooting forth solid 
matter from their interiors, and Mr. Proctor believes this to be 
the source of the countless myriads of meteors which throng our 
own and other planetary systems. While speaking of the sun, I 
may mention that the glowing atmosphere (if it can be so called) 
surrounding this globe having been found to consist mainly of 
incandescent hydrogen, lends great force to Mr. Norman Lockyer’s 
theory, that all the so-called elementary bodies are capable (under 
certain given conditions of pressure and temperature) of being 
resolved into what he believes to be the one and only really elemen- 
tary body, hydrogen. 
