488 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO IJQo. 



What has been said enables us to come to some very important conclusions, by 

 remarking, that this way of considering the sun and its atmosphere, removes 

 the great dissimilarity we have hitherto been used to find between its condition 

 and that of the rest of the great bodies of the solar system. The sun, viewed 

 in this light, appears to be nothing else than a very eminent, large, and lucid 

 planet, evidently the first, or in strictness of speaking, the only primary one of 

 our system; all others being truly secondary to it. Its similarity to the other 

 globes of the solar system with regard to its solidity, its atmosphere, and its di- 

 versified surface; the rotation on its axis, and the fall of heavy bodies, leads 

 us on to suppose that it is most probably also inhabited, like the rest of the 

 plnnets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of 

 that vast globe. Whatever fanciful poets might say, in making the sun the 

 abode of blessed spirits, or angry moralists devise, in pointing it out as a fit place 

 for the punishment of the wicked, it does not appear that tliey had any other 

 foundation for their assertions than mere opinion and vague surmise; but now I 

 think myself authorized, on astronomical principles, to propose the sun as an 

 inhabitable world, and am persuaded that the foregoing observations, with the 

 conclusions I have drawn from them, are fully sufficient to answer every ob- 

 jection that may be made against it. 



It may however, not be amiss to remove a certain difficulty, which arises from 

 the effect of the sun's rays on our globe. The heat which is here, at the dis- 

 tance of 95 millions of miles, produced by these rays, is so considerable, that it 

 may be objected, that the surface of the globe of the sun itself must be scorched 

 up beyond all conception. This may be very substantially answered by many 

 proofs drawn from natural philosophy, which show that heat is produced by the 

 sun's rays only when they act on a calorific medium; they are the cause of the 

 production of heat, by uniting with the matter of fire, which is contained in the 

 substances that are heated: as the collision of flint and steel will inflame a maga- 

 zine of gunpowder, by putting all the latent fire it contains into action. But an 

 instance or 2 of the manner in which the solar rays produce their effect, will 

 bring this home to our most common experience. 



On the tops of mountains of a sufficient height, at an altitude where clouds 

 can very seldom reach, to shelter them from the direct rays of the sun, we al- 

 ways find regions of ice and snow. Now if the solar rays themselves conveyed 

 all the heat we find on this, globe, it ought to be hottest where their course is 

 least interrupted. Again, our aeronauts all confirm the coldness of the upper 

 regions of the atmosphere; and since therefore, even on our earth, the heat of 

 any situation depends on the aptness of the medium to yield to the impression of 

 the solar rays, we have only to admit, that on the sun itself, the elastic fluids 

 composing its atmosphere, and the matter on its surlace, are of such a nature as 



