SCIENCE LETIER FROM PARIS. 241 
ing room. Often when at school, the lesson imperfectly learned during the even- 
ing, becomes well engraved in the memory on our awakening. The mind has 
worked for us during sleep, but we were unconscious of its acts. In antiquity, 
visionaries saw appear the black Eumenides or the divine Apollo; mythology is 
now replaced by the Virgin and the saints, and it isa fact well known to alienists, 
that the delirium and hallucinations of Catholics differ essentially from those of Prot- 
estants. Van der Kalk remarks, that it is by the left ear that patients who are 
possessed, assert they hear Satan speaking to them, while another patient claim- 
ing to be in relations without a good and bad spirit, at once invariably received 
whispers of vice by the left, and counsels of virtue by the right, ear. 
The sun has become a subject of .ery popular study ; naturally we ought to 
be interested in the rays of a star on which life hangs. ‘The sun is the heart of 
the planetary organism: each of its pulsations spreads vital force not only to our 
‘earth, some thirty-seven millions of leagues distant, but to Neptune 1,100 millions 
of leagues away, also to the pale comets abandoned to an eternal winter, and still 
farther, to stars millions of milliards more distant still. This force emanates in- 
cessantly from the sun’s energy, and is distributed around into space with marvel- 
lous rapidity; eight minutes suffice for light to bound to us from the sun, at the 
rate of 75,000 leagues per second. ‘The sun is 108 times larger in diameter than 
our earth; 1,279,000 times more voluminous, and 324,000 times more dense. The 
highest dome in the world is that at Florence erected by the genius of Brunelles- 
chi; it is about forty-nine yards in diameter, the dome of the Pantheon of Paris 
is but twenty-three yards, yet the latter and a bullet eight inches in diameter, 
would represent the relative magnitudes of the sun and our planet. In other 
words, suppose the sun placed in a scales, it would require 324,000 earths to make 
the scales turn. The planets that revolve ’round the sun resemble so many toys, 
yet sun and stars themselves are only atoms of the infinite. The moon gravitates 
around the earth, and the earth around the sun, while the sun whirls the planets 
and tneir satellites toward the constellation Hercules, and these movements are 
executed with a rythm and exactitude, following determined laws, as the hands of 
a watch turn on the pivot or the concentric circles that ebb away on the surface 
of a pond when a stone is thrown therein. All is movement, vibration, harmony. 
In violet light the atoms of ether oscillate at the rate of 740 milliards of vibrations 
per second; red light is slower, its vibrations in the same time are about 380 mil- 
hards; the color violet, is in the order of colors, what the highest note is in the 
order of sound; red represents the lowest color, or base note. An object floating 
on the water obeys the ripples or waves which arrive from various sides, so the 
atom of ether undulates under the influence of heat and light, the atom of air un- 
der the influence of sound, and the planet and the satellite under the influence of 
gravitation. To comprehend the distance of the Earth from the Sun, were a can- 
non ball to travel at the rate of 550 yards a second, it would require nine years 
and eight months to reach the sun. Again the Sun is the center of most astound- 
ing conflagrations and explosions. If the space between our planet and the Sun 
