1865.] Cosmical and Geological Philosophy. 121 



the intimate nature of matter in its highest and most elementary character, 

 such as that essential to the Sun is in this paper inferred to be, agreeably 

 to the principle of philosophical investigation he has suggested as being 

 alone applicable to the Sun, and according to known facts and recognized 

 principles of science. The answer to this question is afforded, he conceives, 

 by modern views of the constitution of gaseous substances as forms of 

 ponderable matter, and of that of the lumiuiferous ether as an imponder- 

 able body. It is deduced from the former, combined with the investiga- 

 tions of philosophers during the last half century, including those of the 

 late Dr. Thomas Young and M. Cauchy, and of M. Neumann and Profes- 

 sor Stokes, that the ether is characterized by enormous molecular activity, 

 rendering it immensely rarer but at the same time more truly solid and 

 elastic than any kind of ordinary or ponderable matter, all forms of which 

 it pervades, even the most dense, coexisting with them in the same space. 



The author infers that the substances peculiar to the Sun transcend the 

 ether in these qualities in even a greater degree than that excels ponder- 

 able matter with respect to them that is, succinctly, that pure solar mat- 

 ter is still more transcendently and intensely solid and elastic because its 

 particles are in still more transcendent activity. This inference is con- 

 sidered to harmonize with the obvious peculiarity of the Sun, that in it 

 alone, of all the bodies and localities of 'the solar system, enormous force - 

 of gravity and an immeasurable intensity of heat are united. 



In the recorded facts of telescopic observation, the author finds an 

 " entire absence of evidence or indication that anything exists in the sen- 

 sible universe which is of greater antiquity than the stars, or prior to them 

 in its origin ;" which, " considered together with the primary induction 

 from the uniqueness and peculiarity of their position and functions as 

 suns," is regarded as tending strongly " to prove that, as a class, the stars 

 are the most ancient objects in the Creation, and also (each in its own 

 sphere of action) the origins of the series of physical agencies and pro- 

 cesses by which the planets and other classes of heavenly bodies were 

 finally produced and are maintained"*. 



This being admitted, it follows that the original production of ponder- 

 able matter takes place in the stars, and in our Sun as one of them, a 

 conception to which the author had been led by the preceding and other 

 considerations long before the application of prismatic chemistry to the 

 Sun. 



The energy set free in the condensation within the Sun, of the highest 

 imponderable matter essential to it into ponderable matter (an expression 

 which is shown not to be a solecism), and eventually into the metallic 

 vapours which the observations of Kirchhoff and other spectroscopists 

 have discovered in the Sun and other stars, is inferred by the author to be, 

 at once, the exclusive proximate source of the heat and light and other 

 energies of the Sun, and (in our solar system) the only and universal 

 * Syllabus of Lectures on Astronomical Physics. Lecture VIII. 



