CHARLES B. WARRING, PH.D. 219 



gases. If inhabited, it is by beings able to endure a 

 heat many hundred times greater than that of any 

 earthly fire, a heat in which substances which remain 

 solid before the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, would be in- 

 stantly dissipated in vapor. Instead of perpetual peace, 

 violence reigns. Through the spectro-telescope cyclones 

 are constantly seen sweeping over its surface, not as on 

 the earth, a hundred miles or so in an hour, but hun- 

 dreds of miles in a second. Fire-spouts, millions of 

 square miles in sectional area, burst at frequent inter- 

 vals from its interior and rise thousands of miles into its 

 atmosphere. Huge vortices, veritable maelstroms, are 

 in almost constant action, down whose throats hundreds 

 of worlds as large as ours could be drawn without 

 crowding or jostling. It is a world of fiery wonders. 

 We read in ancient story of Phlegethon, a river of fire 

 flowing around the realms of Pluto ; but, in the sun, 

 astronomers tell us, is a real river of fire infinitely sur- 

 passing the wildest fiction. A stream more than 300,000 

 miles wide — a distance far greater than from here to the 

 moon — girdles the sun. Unlike rivers on the earth, it 

 has neither head nor mouth, its width is everywhere the 

 same. It is a broad belt of hot matter more than 

 2,750,000 miles long, flowing eastward, not as our Gulf 

 Stream, at the rate at most of five or six miles an hour, 

 but of five or six miles a second, three hundred miles an 

 hours. What a world ! How different from the fancies 

 of a few years ago ! 



Time would fail me to recount the theories whose re- 

 mains thickly strow the shores of the stream of time. 

 Most of them — all the most important ones — were, in 

 their day, accepted as more than probable by the great 

 philosophers, and by others as final truths. John 

 Leslie, a physicist of no mean rank, was selected to 

 write an introductory essay to the eighth edition of 

 the Encyclopedia Britannica, not so very many years 



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