THE AUTHOR'S THEORIES OUTLINED 59 



circumstance that the two planets are visible to us, not 

 by their own light, but by that of the sun reflected from 

 their very heavy atmospheres, which latter we thus 

 necessarily include in appraising their volumes. Were 

 the sun's disc to be suddenly darkened, and were we then 

 to behold him by the light of another star, we should 

 not be able to see his photospheric disc at all, but in its 

 place there would come a dull disc of greatly enlarged 

 dimensions, due to the inclusion of his dense corona. 

 Under these parallel conditions his density as compared 

 with Jupiter and Saturn would, of course, be very much 

 reduced. 



The rotation of the sun on his axis follows clearly 

 enough from the principle of the Prime Kesultant and 

 its torsional stresses, but his so-called equatorial ac- 

 celeration is a phenomenon that requires additional ex- 

 planation. Under the strict letter of Kepler's third law, 

 a planet near the sun's surface would revolve more than 

 two hundred times as fast as does a spot on his photo- 

 sphere. The reason for this apparent contradiction of 

 my theory lies in the fact that the sun is astride the ful- 

 crum of the system and consequently trims the general 

 balance, not merely by rotating, but also by oscillating 

 and tilting back and forth across the medial line. 

 Naturally, the heart of the sun partakes most of the 

 latter maneuver, while his superficial equatorial rings, 

 from the photosphere on upward through the corona, 

 partake most of the rotating tendency ; and of these rings 

 the uppermost, i. e., the farthest from his axis, obvi- 

 ously travels the fastest of all. 



THE STARS 



It goes without saying that the only reliable method 

 of interpreting stellar phenomena is to possess ourselves 

 first of a clear knowledge as to what a star is in essence. 

 Fortunately for our purpose there is one star very near 

 to us our sun which we can view and study at close 

 range and whose life-history is plainly written upon the 

 stony tablets of our Mother Earth. 



