87 



which, in their turn, passing through all the stages of cos 

 mic growth, will in the end become new suns. 



My hypothesis commends itself on the ground that 

 the suns are the only possible sources of fiery masses 

 such as the germs of planets, and that being asthey are 

 themselves huge balls of flame, of dimensions inconcei- 

 vably vast, they seem the natural parents of bodies on a 

 small scale like themselves. The protuberances standing 

 out on the surface of our sun, as witnessed and exami- 

 ned in the case of solar eclipses, reach a height of 

 180,000 versts, and these solar elevations are in plain 

 language tongues of flame. If the reader can picture to 

 himself a tongue of flame 15 times the length of the 

 earth's diameter, he will be able to form a conception 

 of a solar protuberance. 



Finally all the universe of stars and planets, excepting 

 the sun-stars, are such laboratories that their emission of 

 large fiery orbs would result in their destruction. In the 

 process they would inevitably set themselves on fire. 



All the presumptive evidence leads in this way, to one 

 conclusion, viz. that the creator of planetary worlds must 

 be a sun; and if we have not yet been fortunate enough 

 to witness the actual birth of any globe, we con account 

 for our failure in this matter by the following consider- 

 ations, a) Such phenomenon has never been the object 

 of human search, b) There have been no planetary births 

 so far as we can tell, since science has begun to occupy 

 itself with study of the sun. c) Owing to the sun's di- 

 stance from the earth astronomical instruments could 

 perhaps not detect a globe which at its birth would 

 probably be smaller than our asteroids, which themsel- 

 ves, notwithstanding their comparative nearness to our 

 earth, can hardly be observed even in the most powerful 

 improved modern telescopes. 



