THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 1138 
induction are being accumulated; and meanwhile the beautiful rea- 
soning of Arago that solar light corresponds to that emitted by gaseous 
bodies, in being unpolarized, establishes on indisputable scientific 
grounds that the sun is no longer to be regarded as a solid incande- 
scent body. 
Thus slowly, yet surely, does science widen the range of our know- 
ledge, and also the area wherein fancy may freely speculate. The 
question of a plurality of inhabited worlds has engaged the inductive 
reasoning, as well as the fanciful speculations of eminent philosophers 
in recent years; and that of an inhabited central sun cannot there- 
fore be considered as beyond the pale of such far-reaching thought. 
That solar luminary may inclose within its glowing atmosphere a 
world of wondrous compass and beauty. Pure and glorious beings 
may dwell there, that “lie immortal in the arms of fire ;” or, 
tempered by an intermediate cloudy vail, it may be that there, 
beings nobler and higher in the scale of intelligence than we are, 
bask in an endless summer, and a nightless day. Jor there is no 
night there, and fancy may anticipate the light which shall yet make 
clear to us the revelations of even greater mysteries than these. 
But from such speculations I return to the fact that they have 
been suggested by the daily work going on in our own Provincial 
Magenetical Observatory. The results of such daily observations, 
entered in a few columns of figures, or pencilled by the sun’s own 
rays, through the wonderful agency of photography, seem of little 
apparent value ; yet, meanwhile at Washington, Greenwich and Kew, 
at Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Christiana, Moscow, St. 
Petersburg, and other European cities; at Bombay, Travancore, and 
Mauritius, and at British Guiana, Melbourne, and other Colonial 
sites, similar observations prove the simultaneous occurrence of such . 
phenomena in the most distant parts of the earth, and thus reveal 
to us glimpses, at least, of the operations of an unknown force acting 
with corresponding results on the whole globe. Thus the space con- 
trolled and brought within the direct range of our knowledge by the 
records of magnetic observations comprehends not only the earth as 
a whole, but the distant central sun, and the bounds of the solar 
system. But great as is this range in space, the range in time is 
probably still more important. The phenomena of terrestrial mag- 
netism take hold in many ways of other laws, and disclose irregular, 
or at least seemingly irregular changes, also simultaneous in 
